Here's a fun quiz. I'm going to give you three lists of twenty names for wall and floor decorations you can make with the Tailoring tradeskill in Noah's Heart. One of the lists is taken directly from the game. The other two were suggested by Google's AI Chatbot Bard and by OpenAI's ChatGPT-4.
Atlas of Vast Land Yearning Love Fickle Dream Flowery Years Omniscient Forest Misaligned Space and Time Light When Happy Half City Smoke and Rain Glamorous Sand Hippo Impressions Warm and Moist Dune Sea Rafting Snowy Mountain Silver Fox Hibiscus Jade Fat On the Clear Spring Rock Time Light Memory The Sound of Jade Heart Space Golden Wind Relief Splash Mountain Water
List C
Astral Sky Crystal Forest Eternal Sea Fire and Ice Forest of Dreams Frozen Waterfall Golden Desert Green Meadow Heavenly Garden Icy Mountains Jade Palace Luminous Moon Mystic Ocean Night Sky Ocean Waves Pink Rose Purple Rain Red Sunset Silver Moon Snowy Mountain
It's obvious, isn't it? The genuine article is List B.
List A is ChatGPT-4 and List C is Bard.
I gave the AIs List B as a prompt and told them what game it was from, in case they had the rest of the hundred floor and wall coverings you can make in Noah's Heart tucked away somewhere in their data sets. Then I asked them:
"Please create twenty more names suitable for use in the game for new wall and floor coverings."
Bard very politely replied:
"Sure, here are 20 more names suitable for use in the game for new wall and floor coverings:"
and churned out a list in about five seconds. Then it made an observation, without being asked for its opinion, as it likes to do, when it's pretending to be your friend:
"These names are all evocative and atmospheric, and they would be perfect for adding a touch of beauty and wonder to any player's home or base in Noah's Heart."
Bard is very chatty. It's easy to feel like you're having an actual conversation with it, not least because it often chips in with commentary or observations of its own that you haven't asked for and weren't expecting. It would make a pleasant companion or a companionable PA.
ChatGPT-4 is more pragmatic. Given the same prompt, it banged out the twenty suggestions like a hyper-efficient typist, one at a time, in bullet points. Again, it took about five seconds to generate the full list.
And both lists are absolutely fine. They would work perfectly in the context of the game. Many of the hundred real recipes have very similar names: Festive Fireworks, Modern Mocha, Forest Garden...
Actual in-game images. Collaged by me. By hand. No AI. Just me.
The thing is, I didn't choose any of those to jump start Bard and ChatGPT. I hand-picked twenty of the odder names, which wasn't hard - most of the names used in the game are odd. I wanted to see if the AIs, which used to have a reputation for returning quirky, off-the-wall, even disturbingly weird results, could come up with something stranger than what was in the game already.
The answer, disppointingly, is no, they couldn't. With perhaps the sole exception of Eternal Frostbite, I can easily imagine any of the rest of the AI selections appearing on a paint color chart at my local DIY store. It's a lot harder to imagine popping down to B&Q for a litre of Misaligned Space and Time or Hippo Impressions.
And that's one of the big problems with the current generation of AI chatbots, at least from my perspective. They're bland and getting blander by the iteration. Even Tobold's noticed so it must be true.
Craiyon misses the point again...
To me, another problem also seems to be that they don't really follow instructions all that well or perhaps I should say all that consistently. I'd be willing to accept that might have something to do with the prompts I'm setting them but it's not just me.
Sometimes the responses are so uncannily thoughtful and nuanced you can imagine how an excitable person could convince themselves some kind of vestigial consciousness was at work. At other times, though, as in Janelle Shane's attempt to get AIs to create ascii art or even give the least sign they have a vague understanding of what it is, let alone whether they're any good at it, it's easy to get the feeling it's all just a colossal confidence trick, with the AIs showing all the confidence and gullible humans only too eager to be conned.
It is, of course, neither of these things. It's just a set of algorithms like countless others we use every day. Over time they'll be tuned and refined until all the rough edges have turned to safe, slick surfaces. Then they'll be used, either appropriately or inappropriately, for good or for ill and we'll all just have to get used to it.
If that scenario doesn't appeal, you can always comfort yourself with the thought that, unless and until they get a damn sight better, they surely aren't going to be replacing either genuinely creative human beings or good old-fashioned search engines any time soon. Except, of course, they're doing it already.
Spotify had to remove a stream featuring Drake and The Weeknd today after it had racked up over 600,000 streams in a couple of days because neither Drake nor The Weeknd had anything to do with it. It was all done by AI. The ethical, political and legal battles are only just begining but if history is any indicator the ultimate victor will be the technology. It almost always is.
For now, I think we should all have as much fun with the whole thing as we can. We may end up looking back on this as a golden age of open-access AI anarchy, a bit like the early days of silent movies or radio or cable TV. It'll all get corporate soon enough and then we'll be sorry.
Especially if we missed the fun while it was there to be grabbed.
It's spring and this morning I happened to be taking a bunch of shots of the
extensive gardens in my Mara home in EverQuest II and, well, I
thought I'd share them.
What happened was, I finished the Renewal of Ro tradeskill signature
questline on my Berserker/Weaponsmith and the reward was a choice of
desert-themed crafting stations to place in your home. Only he already has one
of every regular station set up in his crafting hall in Mara, the home
everyone on my account uses as a kind of alternate guild hall. Well, everyone
on Skyfire, anyway, which is all of them except go-it-alone
Mitsu.
Since he's a Weaponsmith, I thought it might be nice to have a forge in what
used to be his main residence before he started spending all his time in Mara.
For a decade and more he lived in an extensive mansion in Maj`Dul,
which he expanded to take in much of the city by using teleport pads to "break out" into the rest of the zone.
That house is just packed with memories - all the things he's found, earned,
bought and won over many years of adventuring, crafting and exploring. Parts
of the mansion of it looks like a museum, some of it like a place someone
actually lives and the rest like a warehouse that's recently been struck by an
earthquake.
I wandered round, taking screenshots, feeling proud, puzzled, nostalgic and
overwhelmed. There's just so much, lots of it tidily shelved, organized
and displayed, lots of it... not. It's also almost impossible to photograph.
The EQII camera won't pull back far enough indoors and reacts too
strongly to obstacles. I might do a video tour one day but first I'd have to
know what everything was, which I certainly don't at the moment.
The Mara house is exactly the opposite. It's wide and open and airy, quite
literally a whole zone with all features enabled. There's no need to break out
- indeed there's nowhere to break out to - and you can fly, swim and
dive just as you would be able to in the open-world version.
Although the home comes with a large number of useable buildings, a few of
which I have made some use of, almost unconsciously I've found myself
focusing on decorating the outdoors. There's plenty of it, after all. Just
about all the trees, plants and foliage you see has been added by me, along
with all the statuary and wildlife. About all that was there to start with
were the buildings, the grass, the water and a few scrubby pines.
One side of the inlet I've constructed a kind of othmir village theme park. On
the other I'm developing an increasingly active harbour. Just today I put down a
large stack of crates to make the place look a little more like a working
dockside. I need to move a few things around to improve on the concept but it's
a start.
I had to fiddle with that last shot in Paint.net because, typically,
when I logged back in to take a picture for the post it was the middle of the
night. EQII's housing is the best in the genre but it could still be improved
by taking a few pointers from other games. I'd love to be able to set the time
of day, for a start.
Top of my list, though, would be the ability to sit properly in chairs and lie
down on beds. Almost every other mmorpg allows it. I'm sure
Darkpaw would love for it to be possible in EQII as well so the fact
that isn't must be down to the ancient, proprietary engine the game uses. If
it hasn't happened by now it never will.
I'd also like to see something added to housing in EQII that I've never seen
the point of in Guild Wars 2, namely in-home harvesting nodes. In
GW2 the yield from these is so minimal I've never seen the point of
them, although since players habitually offer access to others in general chat
so they can visit and take advantage of them, maybe I'm missing
something.
In EQII, however, you can place both the full range of crafting stations and
personal storage that holds hundreds of thousands of crafting materials. You
can do all your crafting at home so it would make perfect sense to be able to
do your own gathering there as well.
Maybe someday. For now, I'll be content with what we have. What we have
wonderful.
And now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go tend my garden. Happy home-making!
I wasn't going to do another music post just quite yet but then a couple or
three things came up and now I am. One of them is AI-related, too, so there's
that...
In fact, why don't we start there? I was wandering about in
YouTube this afternoon when I came across something you don't see very
often - a cover of an Ourselves The Elves song. You remember Ourselves
The Elves, right? No, thought not.
Well, anyway, they're from Manilla and they're responsible for one of my
favorite songs of the last ten years, the yearning, haunting, mysterious
Cincinnati Clocks. I was certain I'd featured the mesmerizing live
perfomance they gaveback in 2014 for SOFAR but search can't
confirm I ever did so I'm more than happy to correct that now.
Cincinnati Clocks - Ourselves The Elves
Ourselves The Elves, who are still going, by the way, have more than one great
song to their name. There's the sixties-inflected singalong
I Wouldn't Mind
for one and
Uncertainly
for another. It was finding a cover of that last one that started all this,
whatever it is.
Uncertainly - Alexie Karr(Ourselves The Elves cover)
Now, if you happen to be the one person who actually clicked through the link
and listened to the original, then listened to the cover, you'll have noticed
the backing track sounds identical. That's because it is.
In the notes, Alexie Karr credits "the instrumental" to
something called "vocalremover.org". I was curious about that so I checked it out.
Vocalremover is a free-to-use website that "will help remove vocals from a song". The name pretty much says it
all, doesn't it?
To give it a little more context, albeit not much, "Once you choose a song, artificial intelligence will separate the vocals
from the instrumental ones. You will get two tracks - a karaoke version of
your song (no vocals) and acapella version (isolated vocals)."
And it's all completely free, apparently. No, really, it is. "Despite the complexity and high cost of service, you can use it absolutely
free." And it's fast, too. "Processing usually takes about 10 seconds."
What's more, it totally works. I've tried it. I might even use it to do
some covers of my own except, as vocalremover points out, this is really
nothing more than karaoke. A really interesting cover is always diffferent
from the original, not identical except for the singing.
Ah, but look and listen to that Alexie Karr video. She's used AI to strip
the vocal out of the original recording and - I'm guessing, though she
doesn't credit it - more AI to create the visualization and what she's made
is a small piece of art.
I wouldn't mind doing that. It may not be wholly original but it's not
wholly unoriginal either. As Everett Truesaid
this week, on his less-than-triumphal return to blogging, "There is immediate satisfaction to be had in creating music", even if
it is, as it is in his case, through banging out
tuneless piano covers
on YouTube that hardly anyone ever sees.
All of which raises the question of whether copying is in and of itself a
creative act.
Cello Song - Fontaines D.C. (Nick Drake cover)
Well, obviously if you do it like that...
That's either the second, or maybe the third, promotional release from the
upcoming Nick Drake covers album I mentioned a while back. The first
was the sublime Let's Eat Grandmacover of From The Morning. The third, or maybe the second, was this gem:
I Think They're Leaving Me Behind - Katherine Priddy(Nick Drake cover)
I didn't think I was all that interested in hearing thirty versions of Nick
Drake songs. I am now. I'd love to see a full track listing to find out just
who's been invited to contribute and who picked which song but I guess I'll
have to wait a while longer. Whoever it is sure knows how to build up
expectations. Let's just hope they can satisfy them.
The thing about covers, though, or one of the things, is that unless you know
the original - or another cover of it - they're just songs. Which is fine.
They'll be your originals, then. But it does strip away a layer. It's the
differences that make covers so intriguing.
Bizarre Love Triangle - The Anchoress (New Order cover)
This, for example, is very like the original and yet somehow not all that much
like it at all. If there's one thing no-one ever accused New Order of
sounding it would probably be lush. This is as rich as cream and as smooth as
cream and as full as cream.
In an
interview
she gave about recording this, The Anchoress referenced
Tori Amos, who has to be among the most visionary of all cover artists.
She tears songs down to the bones and builds them back into something new.
Here she is, deconstructing a Bruce Springsteen thumper we've all heard
too many times, making it breathe again.
I'm On Fire - Tori Amos
(Bruce Springsteen cover)
When it comes to Springsteen covers that sound nothing like the
original, though, Suicide'stakes some beating. This is
literally unrecognizeable other than Alan Vega repeating the title a couple of
times at the start. I'm not sure it even counts as a cover in any meaningful
way and yet it makes perfect sense as a tribute to The Boss and the
rich, rock history atop which he stands.
Born In The U.S.A. - Suicide - (Bruce Springsteen cover)
If Suicide covering Springsteen seems strange, let's not forget
Springsteen's covered Suicide too. He's a fan, apparently. There's no figuring musicians. Dylan's been
to see Metallica live.
Twice!
I'm going to finish this with something that's not exactly a cover but runs
with the same pack. This couldn't have happened before video-sharing platforms
like YouTube and universal access to what used to be professional editing
software.
You Should See Me In A Crown - Dodge
(Billie Eilish/Locke & Key mashup)
It's obvious how I came to find that one. It's a pretty good meld but I wonder
if it wouldn't be better if you stripped the dialog out using vocalremover.
Maybe. Maybe not. But the tools are getting better and freer all the
time and AI is going to smooth a lot of the rough spots down so you can do
this stuff at home more easily than ever. And it's already easier than anyone
could have imagined it would be a decade ago.
If I was twenty I would be all over this shit. Maybe I should be
anyway. Maybe I already am.
For some reason, I don't seem to have paid as much attention to the new
Game Update for EverQuest II as I usually would. EQII's GUs are
a big deal, substantial content drops that some games might try to pass off as
full expansions and the latest, Empire of Antiquity, looks like one of
the biggest for a while. It's not like me to pass one up.
And the feature list is impressive. The highlights include
Overseer Season 05
Massive Contested Dungeon
Buried Takish'Hiz: Emergence from Stone [Raid] Sultan's Mahala: Daggers Drawn [Raid]
4 new red shiny collections
New Guildhall
40+ New Adventure quests
25 new house items, illusions, and pets
That's by no means all of it. The
official announcement
has full details. It's a lot.
And yet, I haven't really been all that excited to dig in and see it all for
myself. Well, not all, obviously. Not the raids. But most of the rest ought
to be of interest to me. Jenn Chan'sproducer's letterdid
promise there'd be "content for all playstyles" and looking at
that list there most definitely should be.
I think my lack of engagement stems from the fact that, for the first time in
years, I hadn't finished the Signature Adventure questline from the most
recent expansion before the spring update landed. I explained the
dog-related
reasons behind my tardiness in a post a couple of days ago but it's also true
that these days I'm just a bit tired of boss fights with mechanics that need much attention
paying to them. I never liked fancy fights all that much and now I just don't have the
patience even to grind them out just to get past.
Anyone we know, Zel?
For that reason alone, I was less than thrilled at the prospect of Empire of
Antiquity's center-piece, the "Massive Contested Dungeon"that is
Buried Takish`Hiz. I now realize that was churlish of me. And shortsighted.
"Contested" in this context, for those who aren't up on EQII jargon,
means "non-instanced" or, in other words, what we used to call "a dungeon". I wonder how many other mmorpgs still have those, let
alone would think about adding new ones in 2023. I just checked to see if
World of Warcraft has any and found
this list
but those are what I'd describe as elite areas, mini-dungeons or even
open-world dungeons, none of which is the same thing at all.
Even before WoW arrived and turned the entire genre over to
instancing, EverQuest had begun to move in that direction. 2003's
Lost Dungeons of Norrath introduced the concept to the game and it
was an immediate success.
When EQII launched a year later it came with a mix of contested and
instanced dungeons, a trend that carried on for much of the life of the
game. For a long time, every expansion had to include at least one contested
dungeon or players would revolt.
Eventually, though, that tradition ended. According to the wiki, prior to
this update the last contested dungeon to be added was
Kralet Penumbra in 2015's Terrors of Thalumbra. I'm not at all
convinced that's accurate and there have certainly been some contested raid
dungeons since then, but as
this reply
by EQII dev Gninja, to a forum thread back in 2017 asking why no new
contested dungeons, explains
"...based on our numbers of how many players use them and how many
versions of the zone spin up they are VERY underused compared to any of
the instances... Even the less popular ones"
He goes on to confirm the devs like contested dungeons and would like to
keep making them but with the resources at their disposal it just doesn't
make economic sense. Which means, I guess, that we can take the appearance
of an absolutely gigantic contested dungeon in 2023 as evidence of that
increased EG7 investment in the game we've been reading about.
Whatever the reason, contested dungeons are back - big time. And to my very
considerable surprise, this one does indeed contain the promised something
for everyone.
I just happened to be in Takish Badlands this morning, working on the
tradeskill signature questline with my Berserker, who's also a
max-level weaponsmith, when I spotted a large, interactive structure I hadn't
seen before. On further investigation it proved to be the portal to Buried
Takish`Hiz and since I was there...
I was expecting to stand motionless inside the zone-in, con the nearest mob,
see it was ridiculously out of my weight class, take a screenshot or two and
leave. I ended up spending two hours there and I'd probably be in there
still if it hadn't stopped raining outside, forcing me log out to take Beryl
for a much-needed walk.
Far from being a sprawling, old-school contested dungeon along the lines of
Sebilis or Karnor's Castle, Buried Takish`Hiz is a set of
instances based around a hub but the instances themselves are indeed "Contested"
and being underground certainly means they'd be referred to as "dungeons"
by most players, so I think the description in the press release holds.
The way things are set-up reminds me of Myrist Library and
the four Elemental kingdoms accessible from there by portal. Those, I believe,
were generally thought of as zones rather than dungeons, since
they're open to the sky, but it's splitting hairs. If more than one group of
players can enter an instance and get in each others' way then it's "contested", while
"dungeon" is what every game calls any instance with a few bosses
waiting inside.
Speaking of bosses, Buried Takish'Hiz has thirty-three. Sebilis, considered a pretty big dungeon in its day, has twenty-five. What's even better, some of them, like Wilhelm the Elm up there, are soloable. Not that I've proved it. Yet.
Yes, most amusing. Now tell me where to find them.
In the lobby I grabbed a quest to kill eight each of three types of invasive
species from an NPC who complained bitterly about all the adventurers stomping
around his heritage site, looking for loot. I guess if there are bulls in
your china shop you may as well bribe them to smash up the things you don't
want.
The game also auto-granted me three other quests, to kill regular
mobs, Heroic mobs and Heroic I mobs. I didn't actually notice I'd been given
the tasks until later, when notifications started pinging.
I was, of course, only killing the regular mobs, which was in itself a
miracle - there were regular mobs! For years, to save on duplicated
development costs, the way Darkpaw has been able to offer solo
players access to equivalent content to group players has been by slapping on a
massive buff when you enter a solo version of a Heroic instance. That way, all playstyles get to use
the same assets and much money, presumably, is saved.
I take the appearance of genuine non-heroic mobs in this contested space as another sign of purse-strings being loosened. I can't say as
yet how many areas in the new dungeon complex have dedicated areas for solo
players - access to each wing has to be earned somehow, presumably by doing
the questlines - but the one at the start, The Elddar Exchange,
certainly does.
That's also where Gnorbert, the D.I.R.T.Y. gnome asked me to
go to pick up some artifacts for him. He remembered me from our work
together back in the Tranquil Sea, many years ago. If you play an
mmorpg for long enough, your name does get around - with NPCs, anyway, if not with other
players.
And that's where I'm going to stop for now. I wrote a very long post yesterday and if I don't watch myself this is going
to turn into another. Such length wouldn't be justified because as yet about
all I've done is step inside the dungeon and knock out a couple of
introductory quests. In doing so, however, I've demonstrated to myself that
there is something in this update for me beyond the new Overseer season and
a few collections. It feels good.
I'll hold off on any further reports about Buried Takish`Hiz until I've seen
more of it. Also until someone's had a chance to write up a guide and post it to the
wiki because I'm already stuck on a quest. I'm supposed to be gathering and
repairing a dozen Elddar artifacts but so far I haven't been able to find a
single one.
If only there was someone else in the dungeon I could ask. Oh, wait a
moment...
I've been sitting on a post for a while now (Don't. Just... don't.) about
TV shows I've been watching but the problem with posts like that is it takes a
good while to finish a whole series and viewings tend to overlap. Or at least
they do the way I watch TV. If I wait until a nice neat wrap-up moment, when
I've finished everything and haven't started anything new, well, we'll be
waiting for a long, long time, so I think I'm just going to get to it.
The shows I wanted to cover are:
Daisy Jones and the Six
Eden
Supernatural Academy
Locke & Key
Daria
Camp Camp
I might also cover a couple more if I have time but that looks like plenty for
one post.
Before we begin, I'd also like to mention (Complain about...) how awkward it
is to find the history of what you've watched on both Netflix and
Prime. They each have sections on the front page for your
Watchlist and Currently Watching but to find the full history of
everything you've seen you have to come out of the front end altogether and
dig deep into the Account settings.
I had to google how to find the history for both services before I could go
back and check what I'd seen recently. Of course, that I couldn't just
remember some of the shows without a prompt tells its own story...
Looking at the six shows above, the first thing to note is that four of them
are animations. As I've said before, I seem to be watching more and more
animated shows these days. There are a lot of them on both services and the
quality is high.
Every time this comes up, someone pops into the comments to recommend various
anime shows I ought to be watching and I'm very grateful for that. The thing
I'm increasingly finding, though, is that I don't really notice if what I'm
watching is anime or just plain animation. I'm a lifelong animation fan but in
a much more untutored way than I'm a comics fan or a science fiction fan or an
mmorpg fan. I'm not sure the exact definitions or provenance matter all that
much to me although I'm always up for an academic discussion on the
differences.
I suspect this is going to run long so rather than ramble any more I'm just
going to get on with it. I'm also not going to attempt any thematic linkage or
overarching structure. I typed the list in the order the shows came up when I
checked and I'm just going to go with that.
Daisy Jones and the Six
If we're talking about the fallibility of memory - and on this blog we
always are - then this is a Grade A example. I read
the book
this series is based on back when it first came out in the UK a few years ago.
At the time the author, Taylor Jenkins Reid, was unknown in this
country. Now she has a string of best-sellers to her name.
My memory is very retentive when it comes to novels but it almost always needs
a jump start. If you name a book I've read and ask me what it's about I
probably won't be able to tell you, even if I only read it last week. If I
pick up a copy, though, and glance at the cover and maybe the blurb on the
back, a huge amount of detail will immediately flow back into my mind. It's a
pattern that established itself back when I was studying literature, I think,
based around having to write essays from specific prompts, and it's never
really left me.
The same process usually kicks in when I watch TV or movie adaptations of books
I've read. I may remember almost nothing going in but as soon as the
characters appear and the narrative unfolds, everything comes rushing
back.
Not this time, it didn't.
I watched the whole show, originally framed as a complete-in-itself
mini-series but now apparently the tentative first season of a
maybe-continuing franchise, and I recognized literally nothing about
it. Not the plot, not the characters, not the setting; nothing. That in itself
was so odd it kept distracting me from the show itself, which was a shame
because it's a pretty good one.
I'm going to have to read the book again to find out if it's an accurate
translation of page to screen. I'm certainly not going to claim it's any kind of
accurate description of the 1970s music scene or 1970s America or the
alternative history of Fleetwood Mac or any of those things. I'm pretty
sure it's not. What it most certainly is is a funny, camp, occasionally
poignant romp that feels weirdly convincing in its earnest evocation of
seventies and eighties TV mini-series. It's not so much a parody of the form as
an homage.
The performances are pretty good. I found Daisy herself to be slightly
- occasionally intensely - irritating, which is a compliment to the actor,
Riley Keogh. I don't think you're supposed to like Daisy Jones.
Sam Claflin as Billy Dunne was good when he was being gruff, not
quite so good when he wasn't.
The whole premise relies on the chemistry between the two of them, which was
almost there but maybe not quite. I liked most of the supporting cast,
especially Suki Waterhouse as the inexplicably English keyboardist.
There were times when it felt like Spinal Tap lite and those were good
times.
By far the weakest aspect of the show was the music, which is a fairly major
problem for a show about a rock band who are #1 in the
Billboard Hot 100 and headlining stadiums. There is
an actual album
of the music from the show. Pitchfork gave it a
6.6
which is at least a point more than I'd give it. It's not bad, just bland, but
then, back in the late '70s, I'd have told you Fleetwood Mac were bland, too.
I'd be wrong now, but I was right then.
For a supposed mini-series the ending was weird. It just seemed to stop.
Overall, though, it was a fun road trip and I hope they do expand it into an
ongoing series. I'd watch more.
Eden
Another mini-series. I watched this specifically because it was complete in
itself and only four episodes long. It's a post-collapse show about a
human girl waking up in a world filled by robots. The animation is solid, the
characters endearing, the plot rolls along, there's action, adventure, humor
and pathos. It's cute. I liked it.
It's also quite incoherent at times. A lot of details make no sense. Why would
robots farm apples and how could a human baby grow up into a healthy adult on
a diet of nothing else? If the world is filled with nothing but robots with no
apparent internal or external threats for the past thousand years, why is
there a sinister security force and a surveillance culture that would do a
police state proud? And if there is such a force, why is it so radically
ineffectual? Seriously, Imperial Stormtroopers could do a better job than this
lot.
It doesn't pay to pick holes in these things. If the execution is entertaining
then give the premise a pass. My only real problem was with the ending, which
I won't spoil. Suffice to say, be careful what you wish for. That's my
takeaway.
Recommended for a quick watch. It's neat, complete and satisfying, provided
you don't think too hard.
Supernatural Academy
This is the only show on the list I haven't finished watching but I'm throwing
it in anyway. I really shouldn't because I only have two episodes left and
it's always a risk trying to sum up a story before you know the ending but if
I leave it for the next TV post I'll probably have forgotten all about it.
That's not to say Supernatural Academy is forgettable; more an
observation on how quickly one show replaces another on the never-ending
conveyor belt of content. It's actually fairly memorable for a Saturday
Morning kind of show.
It does feel a bit like a throwback in that respect, with its ensemble cast of
sassy teens, each with their own signature power, but I don't recall many
shows of that era having such strong, coherent narratives. It's very much a
plot-driven affair, with a single throughline and very little in the way of
side stories. It's not episodic at all, even though it employs an odd A/B
structure, pairing episodes as though each set were some kind of
chapter.
I'm really enjoying it. The characters are all quite distinct, even if most
are types or tropes. The script is strong and the voice acting is good, both
carrying a little more than their share of the weight, since the visual detail
is relatively light and the animation can be slightly stiff. It's particularly
noticeable in some of the running scenes, which can feel a little jerky.
None of that detracts from the pleasure I've had watching Mischa,
Jessa and the Pack negotiate high school high jinks and
world-threatening dramas. If anything, not being quite as slick as some
digital animation can be adds to its charm.
The show originally aired on Peacock and is currently on Netflix in the
UK. It's based on
a series of books by Jaymin Eve, which look a lot more racy than the adaptation. No second season has been
confirmed as yet so I hope that ending I haven't seen doesn't turn out to be a
cliffhanger. I'd definitely watch another season if someone wants to make one.
Locke & Key
On the matter of endings, a very controversial and troublesome topic these
days, I hope it's not a spoiler to say that Locke & Key has a
proper finish. There are three seasons, all of which I've seen, and the third
ends with a wrap-up conclusive enough for a movie. They obviously either knew
they weren't getting renewed or a three season arc was always the plan.
I went into this one somewhat grudgingly. In my mind it was a magical detective show with teen protagonists and a
somewhat silly premise. I had it backed up on my watchlist
with no real enthusiasm as a fall-back should I run out of better things to
watch. Then I did.
Locke & Key is almost nothing like I thought it would be. About the only point of
contact between my imagining and the actual show is the part about teen
protagonists, but even there it's more along the lines of
Stranger Things than Supernatural Academy. There are plenty of adult
characters but, more importantly, the story doesn't really differentiate all
that much between them; everyone's caught up in the same nightmare and age
doesn't signify.
Indeed, one of the central characters, Bode Locke, is barely a teenager
at all. I think he's thirteen but he looks younger. Played very well by
Connor Jessup, like all the central cast he's very convincing, especially considering what he's tasked with playing in Season Three.
It's a
well-acted show for the most part, although a few of the supporting characters
seem a bit unconvincing. It does have a very large dramatis personae, with
Wikipedia
listing almost thirty "Main" and "Recurring" characters. Not
all of them get the space to grow or the opportunity to make much of an impact.
Tonally, Locke & Key is a horror show. This took me by surprise,
although it wouldn't have if I'd read the credits in advance. I knew it was
based on a comic-book but I didn't know that comic was written by
Joe Hill, aka Stephen King's son and a noted horror author in his
own right.
The show works off a very odd and largely incoherent premise involving other
dimensions, demonic possession and extremely ill-defined magical powers. To
call the set-up quirky would be doing a disservice to quirks. The whole thing seems
to have been precariously built around the pun in the title, a
foundation most ill-prepared to support the weight of three seasons and
twenty-eight episodes.
Strangely, all of that works very much in its favor. The highest of high
concept frameworks allows the plot to proceed without any impediment of
explanation. Characters and powers appear and disappear as the plot requires
and everyone reacts to even the most impossible revelations with admirable
sang-froid, which is just as well. I'm pretty sure if as many people in real
life discovered that magic was real as happens here, it would be the top global
news story and the small New England seaside town where the show is set would
be either locked down or filled with crazies, rubberneckers and
journalists within hours.
If you park your disbelief at the door, however, Locke & Key is a highly
entertaining thrill ride alongside a bunch of mostly likeable characters,
involving a good deal of unusual imagery and a take on magic you probably
won't have seen before. It was much better than I was expecting and although I
appreciated the tidy and formal ending, I'd rather have had another season.
Daria
Daria is an old show. A quintessentially millennial show. A classic
show. Another animated show. It's long been a show I thought of with both
fondness and respect but until this year I hadn't actually seen much of it.
It was originally made for and shown on MTV, back when MTV did stuff
like this. In the UK I believe it aired on Channel 4. I only caught a few
episodes back then but it made an impression. The main reason I remember it so fondly,
however, is that - as I've mentioned a few times - I played through the whole
of Baldur's Gate using a voice-pack that replaced everything my
character said with a sample taken from the show.
For that reason, I tended to think of Daria as a series of one-liners, which
isn't wholly unfair but which undersells its power and reach. It begins as a dust-dry sardonic comedy filled with snark, sarcasm and wit,
as befits a project borne out of the meta-irony of Mike Judge's
oft-misunderstood Beavis and Butthead, where the character of Daria
first appeared, but over the course of five seasons and sixty-five episodes it
develops into something much more nuanced and bittersweet.
The five season arc, if it can be described that way, shows some characters
sticking with the same one-note tropes from beginning to end while others show
novelistic character growth. Daria, her best friend, Jane Lane and
Daria's younger sister, Quinn, all develop adolescent self-knowledge in
a most convincing way, while others - Stacy and Sandi of the
Fashion Club or Jodie Landon, class president and reluctant
African-American role model, for example - offer less overt but still poignant
glimpses into their inner lives.
The writing is always sharp and the show is very funny at times but as the
seasons pass, the humor becomes bleaker, the situations more awkward. High
school may not be the best time of your life but who's to say college or
adulthood will be any better? There are moments when the whole thing risks
veering off an existential cliff, particularly in some of the scenes between
Daria, Jane and Tom, the boy they both - unfortunately - share feelings
for, but somehow the writers and cast always just about manage to pull things
back from the brink of despair.
It's not quite Bojack Horseman - The High School Years but it pushes
some of the same buttons, albeit not as hard and not for as long. There was
supposed to be a spin-off series in development a couple of years back, called
Daria and Jodie
but it's been re-titled: now it's just called Jodie. Also, it's not a
series any more, it's a movie.
Written out of her own story. It's no more than Daria would expect.
Camp Camp
And finally, Camp Camp. I don't have all that much to say about this
one, other than I enjoyed it, I'm glad I found it but I have no idea
why I started watching it. I think I saw it was short and I had a
quarter of an hour to fill. Once I was in, though, I was, as they say,
hooked.
It was a hard show to watch, not because of anything about the subject matter
but because it originally aired on the web channel Rooster Teeth and
doesn't follow a typical TV pattern. Amazon have tried to package it in a more traditional format for Prime but
haven't made a very good job of doing it. I watched every episode there in the
order they were listed, only to discover later it was neither all of them nor
in the correct sequence.
I tracked the rest down on YouTube and I've now seen the lot, albeit not
necessarily in the order they were intended to be viewed. It doesn't matter
all that much because, while there is a storyline of a sort, there's no
strong, central narrative. On the other hand, it doesn't not matter at all
because most of the main characters do exhibit a kind of growth, eventually
and incrementally, and it is possible, over time, to become quite attached to
them, which would be a lot harder if you saw the episodes out of order.
That's something I certainly wouldn't have expected at the start. Camp Camp
crashes in as a brash, loud, chaotic comedy with one-note characterization and
an aggressive sense of humor. Like most sitcoms that stick around a while, though,
the characters slowly establish a presence that outweighs the situation in
which they find themselves and in doing so turn into real people.
Even if they're cartoons. Screw animation - Camp Camp is definitely a
cartoon. It's like a Viz strip come to life, if Viz was an American
comic. The Viz comparison comes to mind not least because there's a
lot of swearing, although weirdly there's also a lot of euphemism, too.
After a while I figured out that someone must be counting the actual cuss
words so as to stay below some arbitrary certification quota. It means in any
given episode, Gwen might say "Fuck" once and "Freakin'"
five times. Which, okay, is a thing someone might do, only not quite the way
it's done here.
It doesn't matter because Camp Camp is in no way a realistic show. There are
ghosts in it for a start. And a platypus. What it is is funny. And smart. Go
watch it. If you can find it. It's already not on Prime any more.
And that's more than enough for today. Anything else I was going to include will just have to go unrecorded. I'll be back with another of these just
as soon as I've watched something new. It might be on DVD next time, though.
Unlikely as it might seem, I seem to be running out of new things to watch on my
streaming services and I'm freaked if I'm going to subscribe to any more!
As must be obvious to everyone by now, I'm playing EverQuest II again. Not that I ever stopped. I just hadn't been playing much of anything for a while and EQII had dropped out of what minimal rotation remained. Now it seems, without even trying, I'm very much back on the mmorpg horse and I have EQII to thank, if thanks is the appropriate response.
To be strictly accurate, I ought to be offering up my gratitude to whomever decided it was time to merge Kaladim and Antonia Bayle. The thought of being stuffed unceremoniously into ABmade my skin itch and since there was a timer counting down I couldn't just grunt and ignore it.
Once I was back, I soon found plenty to do. I just needed a change of emphasis.
Back in January or February I'd stalled on the signature adventure questline from the current expansion but I'd never made all that much progress with it, mostly because I've found it awkward to commit to instances involving long and/or challenging boss fights ever since we got Beryl the dog. She mostly ignores what happens on screens but when it comes to dungeons, she has an almost supernatural ability to wake up and demand attention at precisely the worst moment, when I'm either trying desperately to stay alive or figure out what I need to do to get the boss down.
I think it might be the change of intensity in the audio output that triggers her attention. Boss fights are noisy and I always play with in-game sound on and turned up fairly loud. She doesn't twitch during normal gameplay but prolonged battles are a different matter.
That, of course, only explains what might be waking her up when she's asleep in the armchair behind me. What causes her to come bounding downstairs to paw at my arm and bark just as I've gotten the boss down to ten percent is less clear. Maybe she thinks I'm battling with an intruder - not that she'd be much use if I was.
After several such incidents, I began avoiding anything I couldn't easily pause at a moment's notice. It wasn't just in EQII. I'm way behind on the main storyline in Noah's Heart for the same reason. Still, I can't in good faith offer Beryl as an excuse for backing out of more challenging content there without also acknowledging that I never much liked it anyway. If there's one thing you don't want to play Noah's Heart for, it's the combat.
I could easily organize things so I'd be able to count on an uninterrupted run at the instances but I was happy to take the opportunity to drop out of anything involving lengthy scraps in either - or indeed any - game. I'm really not much interested in that side of mmorpgs any more.
There's another factor at play, too. In both games, as in most mmorpgs, patience makes things easier. More levels and better gear turn fights that were slugfests into walkovers. So long as the game offers more than one way to make your character stronger, you can always just defer the fights you don't want to do until you're overgeared, overleveled or both.
All of that explains both why I stopped and why I started again but not why I kept on playing once I'd gone back. The main reason, I think, was the break.
Yesterday, Syp posted a list of "6 ways to fall back in love with MMOs again", all of which were sound advice. #3 on the list was "MMOs are a game, not a marriage", under which rubric he wrote "Give your regular MMO a break from time to time". I wouldn't even say I had a single "regular MMO" these days but even so taking a break really refreshed my enthusiasm.
The other significant factor in getting me back and playing EQII daily was the unplanned reintroduction of low-level gameplay to the mix. I've always said I prefer the low to mid levels in mmorpgs but the increasing willingness of developers to blur the boundaries between low and high, whether by introducing zone scaling or offering catch-up mechanics to bring everyone to endgame, has meant that for some years, without even meaning to, I've found myself mostly at the cap in the games I've been playing.
Mitsu (nee Lana) on Kaladim was Level 26 when I logged her in to move her to her new home. The level cap in EQII is now 125. If I made a fresh character on a standard-ruleset server, those first 26 levels would pass in a session or two but because I'd done them on Kaladim back when it launched, they'd taken me weeks.
I just checked and I have three and a half days played on Mitsu, about 85 hours. That represents maybe thirty or forty sessions, which is a considerable investment of time. She and I have history; she feels like a real character.
It was a connection I felt as soon as I began playing her again, which is why I fell so easily into a familiar pattern of sorting out somewhere for her to live, upgrading her gear, getting her a suitable mercenary and all the other things that make playing EQII such an absorbing and entertaining experience.
Since she re-located to the Isle of Refuge server I've been playing her for an hour or two every day. She's now Level 44 but her real progress has been as a crafter. Her Jewelcrafting stands at Level 56 but she's also made great improvements in her ancillary and secondary tradeskills - Adorning, Transmuting and Tinkering. I've been doing the daily quests for each of them diligently and she's now better at all of them than many of my max-level crafters.
What's more, she's been pursuing the infamous Gathering Obsession timeline offered by the much-reviled Qho, a child who wants to obtain samples of gathered materials from every part of the world so he can compare them. This, he's compelled to do from the comfort of the lake in which he insists, for reasons never made clear, on standing, since his Mom won't let him go adventuring, almost certainly because she suspects any party that allowed him to join would murder him within the day. He's really quite annoying.
I've done this quest several times before. It takes many, many hours and can be very frustrating. People do it because the rewards are great and it's an effective way to raise all of your gathering skills but the idea of doing it for fun might be a bit out there for most.
And yet I've been loving it. I'd forgotten just how relaxing gathering in EQII can be. I know some mmorpg players prefer active gathering, where you have to complete some kind of mini-game to pick leaves from a bush or chop up a log but I much prefer the zen calm of clicking a node and watching a progress bar fill.
As well as working on Mitsu's skills, I've been keeping up with my gathering dailies on my first maxed crafter on Skyfire. I only do one round of those most days now but a while ago I was taking the trouble to pick them up two or three times a day as the cooldowns refreshed.
Another thing I've been doing with Mitsu has been building up her portfolio of Overseer agents. Since she's alone on her server she needs to do everything herself. She can't just rely on whichever of the team happened to be around when a feature was added to provide that service for everyone, as happens on the server where I normally play.
Yesterday's patch brought Game Update 122: Empire of Antiquity to the live servers and along with it Overseer Season 5. Every character receives a boost to open up the new Overseer content but Mitsu can still access previous seasons by way of the Charged quests handed out on request by Stanley Parnem on the West Freeport dockside.
She'll have to take a back seat from now on, though. The Account's pool of Overseer missions is shared across servers and since Overseer remains one of the best ways to obtain at-cap solo gear without having to kill bosses or run instances, my max levels will demand preference. I'm now looking at a few weeks of grinding Season 5 missions until I have enough, followed by daily re-applications until everyone has more gear than they know what to do with, by which time the Panda quests will be back and most of what I got from Overseer will be out of date again. So it goes.
One thing's for sure. I'll run out of interest long before I run out of things to do. This post represents just a snapshot of the vast range that's available. When things start to feel stale, which they inevitably will, eventually, I'll take another break so I can come back and start doing it all over again.
I thought of calling this post "Stockholm Syndrome" but really it's all my own choice. Then again, I would think that, wouldn't I?
Not that I want to obsess about it but the news just keeps coming. I know these hype trains roll around with tedious regularity, only to end up shunted off into some cultural siding, rusting reminders of promises unfulfilled, but occasionally one just keeps picking up speed and momentum until it's hard to hear anything above the singing of the rails as it speeds by on its way to the future.
While many of the claims being made may be overstated, many of the reports exaggerated, there are already so many active applications of the process in play it would take a major effort of will to deny the reality that's already upon us. The future can look after itself; this is the present talking.
Of course, just as with most of the insanely over-optimistic claims made on behalf of the metaverse, much of what's being said and written about AI is pure nonsense. Whatever merits either may have are not helped by the crazed, evangelistic language and wildly hyperbolic assertions made by their most fervent supporters.
The evidence, however, speaks for itself. For the imaginary metaverse so heavily promoted by shills for crypto and blockchain, sad, deluded failures like Decentraland do service as the very opposite of proof of concept,offering up ruined monuments to greed, hubris and self-delusion, as Dan Olson's lengthy and entertaining takedown takes almost too much pleasure in describing. Meanwhile, anguished, aggrandized pleas for recognition of AI sentience come across more as cries for help from those that make them than any remotely objective assessment of current technological capability.
It's all too easy in the current, fevered climate to make assumptions that lurch too far to the extreme, to believe it's either all a crock or a scam or a farce or the singularity or the apocalypse. It's none of these things. Then again, I'm not going to be the one to assure you there aren't crooks, scammers and farceurs at work here too. They're always with us.
Backtracking just a little, where I would take issue with Dan Olson is in his rubbishing of the notion that to believe the metaverse is already here is in some way to give in to vaguery that renders the term meaningless. Nope. It's here alright. Like AI, the metaverse is observably present. It just doesn't look like the photos in its press pack.
The metaverse is clearly the worldwide web we all use every day. It already fulfills all of the necessary criteria - instant communication anywhere at any time with anyone; immediate access to services and products; communal virtual spaces; avatars, abstracts, anonymity. The pieces are in place. The only thing that's likely or that needs to change substantively is our mode of access which, as Dan rightly explains, will not magically arrive as a world filled with people happily strapping half-bricks to their foreheads.
Virtual reality of the kind imagined by its zealots will have to wait for technical solutions several orders of magnitude more strange and rare than anything we've seen so far. My own feeling is that we're far more likely to adopt something along the lines of the augmented reality seen in The Expanse, where schematics replace flat screens via a form of projection, than anything like Star Trek's holodeck, but there's no need for either. The flat screens we have now will do just fine.
As the metaverse turns out to be nothing more than a fanciful rebranding of the digital revolution that began thirty years ago, so AI may end up being nothing more exotic than a collection of software we employ to reduce the amount of tedious busywork we've been mislabeling "creativity" for far too long. Ever since the industrial revolution, engineers have been automating processes that used to require manual labor; now the software engineers are getting in on the act.
Much of the negativity I've seen concerning the advance of generative AI into areas previously handled by low-wage, low-status workers has revolved around the inherent uselessness of the product itself. The argument seems to be that AIs are only capable of churning out reams of twaddle, which might well be used to replace the twaddle previously produced by people at a much slower and costlier rate, and that this is somehow a bad thing because it will put the twaddlers out of a job.
At best it seems like something of a circular argument. If we don't value the output, why do we value the means of its production? And if we consider producing it a worthwhile way for someone to earn a living, why do we not value the work they produce? Is it humanitarian to want to reserve an occupation for human use so those without better prospects can keep themselves alive by producing work no-one wants or values?
Don't look at me. I did English. I think you want a philosophy grad or a sociologist or maybe even an economist. I just find it a bit unconvincing as an argument, that's all, which may well be because I don't know what I'm talking about. Wouldn't be the first time.
I also don't find it all that interesting. I'm not that bothered about who writes copy I don't read for websites I don't visit. AIs or interns, it's all a bit too abstract for me.
A fight in which I do have more of a dog, and one which ought to be of particular interest to residents of this part of the blogosphere, might be the potential incursion of AI into gaming. There's been some talk of that of late, not least in the abrupt redirection of resources intended for the "social mmorpg" Galaxies of Eden into a business dedicated instead to "the creation
of cybernetic beings and eventually infinite virtual universes."
I first read about this at MassivelyOP, where the tone of the reporting was decidedly cool. I'm used to MOP being heavily down on anything AI or metaverse adjacent, so I went directly to the source to make up my own mind. In this case I think I'd have to acknowledge the sarcasm and disdain is probably justified. I refer you to the embedded video in the linked page if you require further convincing.
It's my feeling that generative AI will come to play a substantial role in the making of video games, especially rpgs. The two seem to be made for each other. Far from feeling apprehensive about how they might interact, I'm very keen to see them strike sparks off each other. I do not, however, believe that, as claimed by the developers of Galaxies of Eden, "We are now at the precipice of attaining true AI sentience and infinite content generation". In your dreams.
They also claim to have "managed to craft
a crudely sentient cybernetic being", something I more than doubt, even with the most generous definitions of "sentient" and "being". Or "crudely", for that matter. As usual, there seems to be a self-destructive desire to run at breakneck speed into the future, not just before mastering walking but at the very moment when the first, tottering steps are being taken.
A much more reasoned and objective experiment with AI integration in an mmo - or in this case a text-based MUD - was reported by New World Notes, a blog that styles itself "The world's longest-running metaverse news and culture site." I won't attempt to precis the full article; it's worth reading in full, including the transcripts of some of the ChatGPT-generated NPC conversations that took place in game. They are impressive, at least if you're the kind of person who'd normally impressed by roleplayers larking around.
If nothing else, it demonstrates that ChatGPT can certainly improvise as well as most casual roleplayers, admittedly not the highest of bars. As Matt Mihaly of Iron Realms, the company behind Aetolia, the MUD in question, makes abundantly clear, however, any widespread integration between commercially available generative AI programs and mmos would be prohibitively expensive right now.
What probably wouldn't be either impractical or costly, however, would be asking something like Chat GPT or Bard to write static quests. In fact, why speculate? In the immortal words of Luci from Disenchantment, as recordedon the T-shirt I'm wearing right now... Just Do It!
My prompt:
"Here is an example of how quest dialog is formulated in EverQuest II:
(Which I've cut because it's far too long for the post - I used the first section of dialog here if you really want to know.)
Here is the structure of a short quest in the game:
" Speak to Gherrana Cobbleblork at the Highland Outposts to begin this quest. She asks you to "gather some feathers from the kragploom aviaks".
Kill 10 of any type of Kragplooms. The closest ones are Kragploom chicks in The Highlands. More Kragplooms can be found on top of Kragploom Butte north-northeast of The Highlands. ( 91,223,197 )
Return to Gherrana for your reward. "
Please construct a short quest for the game in which a non-player
character asks a player character to go somewhere and do something for
them in similar style. Include names and some dialog to give the quest
flavor.
And here's Bard's response:
"Sure, here is a short quest for EverQuest II:
Quest Name: The Lost Key
Quest Giver: Agnar the Smith
Location: The Commonlands
Quest Description:
Agnar the Smith has lost his key to his workshop. He asks you to find it for him.
Quest Steps:
Speak to Agnar the Smith in the Commonlands.
Go to the nearby cave and search for the key.
Return the key to Agnar the Smith.
Reward:
100 platinum pieces
Dialog:
You say, "Hail, Agnar the Smith."
Agnar the Smith says, "Greetings, traveler. What can I do for you today?"
You say, "I've heard you lost your key."
Agnar the Smith sighs. "Yes, I did. I was working on a new sword when I accidentally dropped it into the nearby cave. I've looked everywhere, but I can't seem to find it."
You say, "I'll go look for it."
Agnar the Smith smiles. "Thank you, traveler. I'll be forever in your debt."
You go to the nearby cave and search for the key. After a few minutes, you find it on the ground near a pile of rocks.
You return to Agnar the Smith.
You say, "I found your key."
Agnar the Smith is overjoyed. "Thank you so much! I don't know what I would have done without you."
Agnar the Smith gives you 100 platinum pieces.
Agnar the Smith says, "Please, take this as a token of my gratitude."
You say, "You're welcome. I'm glad I could help."
That took Bard about five seconds and can anyone honestly say its substantively inferior to any run-of-the-mill mmorpg quest? If anything, it already assumes too much backstory compared to the average "Fetch" quest.
I'm not suggesting the EQII team would be able to copy and paste the whole thing into the game verbatim - you probably wouldn't want to be handing out 100 platinum pieces for a Commonlands quest, for a start and I'm not sure where the cave might be - but I am saying it wouldn't require much more than a little tidying up before it could be slotted in alongside most of the existing low-level quests in that zonewithout anyone being any the wiser.
To my mind, it's not a matter of having AIs replace designers or writers so much as giving those people a powerful new tool that could make their work a lot easier - and quicker. If nothing else, it ought to make a big difference to those one-dev shops I keep reading about.
Maybe we will eventually be able to leave the AIs to it and all just sit back and consume what they produce but long before that paradisaical day arrives I suspect we'll be enjoying their human-moderated output without even realizing.
Much the way we spend much of our time in the metaverse every day of our lives right now.
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