... And Raise You 40

Ha! I did get it done by Sunday! Mostly because I was too tired after work to play games and listening to music is easy, although in this case I wouldn't exactly call it relaxing. Remind me not to do it again next year. Yeah... right...

Anyway, here's part two of the series no-one wanted. My specialty! See the first installment for the rules. 

Hah! "Rules"!

1. Cortisone - FHUR - ooh I like this! Skittery, fractured club beats with a scifi gloss. Keeps shifting focus, too. As they say, bangin' - A
2. The Ball - Youth Sector - 80s funk/disco with a disturbing twist, not least in the band's fashion choices - B+
3. That Girl - SpaceAcre - If they ever ban animal masks there's going to be a lot of indie bands flat out of ideas for the next video - solid indie-rock - B
4. not a vibe - Chubby Cat - Got a strange feeling we've had Chubby Cat on the blog before... B
5. British Rail Class 170 Turbostar - Static Caravan - ok, we have a winner for the best band name/song title combo... Half Man, Half Biscuit do Kraftwerk. I really want to see what these people look like - B+
6. Holy Smokes - Shtëpi - Whoever told you the post-punk revival was over was lying. They just keep coming. What are the Glaxo Babies doing now, that's what I want to know? Their day finally came and they're nowhere to be found. - B
7. Statue - Tilly Valentine - A blessed relief after all that clanging and banging. Sweet pop r&b. C+
8. Nothing's Gonna Change - Rowan - What I said about post-punk before? Same for guitar bands. C+
9. Girl God Gun - Gen and the Degenerates - Oh, this is the one we've had before. Sorry Chubby Cat, my mistake! Also, more post-punk fractured funk. Top end, though. A
   
   
10. Letter of Resignation - Problem Patterns - FFS! Forget post punk, now it's 1978! A minute too long but otherwise great, especially that solo. B+
11. Keeper - Natalie Lindi - Not sure what this is. Pop balladry, I guess. - C
12. Twist - Joe T. Johnson - Link goes to David Dean Burkhart's channel and this sounds exactly like that would lead you to expect - C
13. All in Your Head - Caleb Kunle - funky R&B - slick - not doing it for me, though - C
14. SOLEIL - GEORGIAN - Strikingly odd video that fits the lush, quasi-goth tune. Nose rings really seem to be making a comeback. - B
15. Rituals - Mouse Teeth - it's like whoever did the playlist programmed the last one and this so you'd go "Oh, no, you're right - that's what a strikingly odd video for a quasi-goth tune really looks like!" - C
16. E1 - Latir - not easy to label, so, good for that. Brooding comes to mind but a little playful as well - B
17. You're a Lot - SISTRA - Pleasant, unmemorable - C
18. Sundays Are Always Quiet - NO PHOTOS – Had high hopes for this from the title but it's not my kind of thing at all. - D
19. Move On - Temm - Pleasant. Nothing else to say. - C
20. Knuckle Sandwich - Some Remain - Blimey! That woke me up. Post-punk, here we come again, only with some hardcore thrown in. Video's clever. - B
    
    
21. Heartbreaker - Internet Cafe - I really liked this but Internet Cafe is a flat-out weird name for someone peddling smooth drum&bass infused R&B - B+
22. Out of My Mind - Jonathan Patel - There's retro and then there's archival retro. Even the font screams 1973. Fine if you can't find your time machine. - C+
23. Ringing- TEEG - Not going to attempt to label this. Really oughtn't to be listening to it. - C
24. Feeling It All - Nadia Kadek - Possibly the first song I've ever seen on YouTube with a completely black screen throughout. Minimal visuals, minimal music. Certainly makes you concentrate on the singing. Makes me feel I ought to be in a church hall somewhere, drinking warm orange squash and concentrating hard. - C
25. Solve - Izzy Withers Prod. Eddie Lopes - Is someone playing some kind of existential joke here? Now it's a plain pink screen with a female vocal and minimal musical backing. Well, minimal until the drummer wakes up around halfway in. This is gorgeous - delicate and fragile. Lovely. B+
26. Somewhere in the Middle - Niji - Jazz-funk instrumental. Really, what else is there to say? - C
27. DRILL VS GRIME [THE PRELUDE] - Jords, Lil Sykes - Like I could tell the difference! - C
28. Southbound - ladylike - I thought I knew where this was going and then it went all prog on me! C (Or B+ if I was fourteen again.)
29. Feeling Like  - JayaHadADream & Wasalu - Dreamlike and soothing in a way it really oughtn't to be. - B
30. 24 hours - Chloe Slater - O. M. G! My absolute favorite so far. I just watched in awe. The disconnects between what she looks like, what she sounds like, what the backing track is doing and what she's saying are like a series of drug hits. I felt jangled to glory. One thing I haven't addressed at any point is how these 90 acts would actually look on stage at Glastonbury. Chloe would be mind-blowing. Apparently this is literally the only thing she's ever done, too, so her set would be hella short! - A. Thinking it might be A+
    
    
31. You Wanted This - Jodie Nicholson - I don't think I did, you know... Another black screen, this time with a rather pleasant instrumental track playing over it. How is this a submission for a live performance at a festival? And yet... B
32. Shade of Blue ft. Jess Edie - FineMusicUK - I'm getting confused now. I guess in the chillout zone. Do they still have those? - C. Maybe B. I'm losing the ability to tell one thing from another.
33. I'm Fine, I'm Alright - Hongza - I think this might be an actual band. I'd almost forgotten such a thing existed. Not sure I wanted to be reminded like this. - C-
34. ELEPHANT - Zoka The Author - Very odd video. Again with the animal masks. Pretty original, especially the violin. - C+
35. Untied (Left You Behind) - Con - Nice groove, soulful r&b, lowest views of all the videos so far, I think (13) - C+
36. Voiceover - Soft Top - very muso pitch in the blurb, citing Steely Dan as an influence and name-checking half a dozen bands the eight of them have been in before. Polished AOR. That's not really a compliment. - C
37. Oxygen - Auger - Synthygoth! He has a deeper voice than that guy out of Tindersticks. Made my speakers rattle not to mention my chest. - B
38. IF WE FALL - Affection To Rent - Grunge, apparently. Also the singer was "hand-chosen" by members of D. C. Fontaines. Very, very rocky. As in rock music. Not as in shaky. It's not at all shaky. - C
39. Ticket To Rock - Daxx & Roxane - Fuck me! Timing is all. Did I say the last one was rocky? This would give AC/DC a run. I literally had no idea anyone under 60 still made music like this. Or wanted to. Seriously, it sounds exactly like the second support band on a Thin Lizzy tour sometime around 1975 - C
40. Under Attack - BackRoad Gee - Something going on here I don't understand. This has 1.3m views. Reminds me oddly of Spearhead. I think it's the arc-welder. - C+

Oh, wow... and that's the end. I'm really confused by the numbers. Everything I read said there were 90 on the longlist. With three flagged on YouTube as "unavailable", there still ought to be 87 but I count only 85, which is the same as the playlist, so I didn't miss any. I guess whoever said there were 90 must have rounded up.

I can't say I'm missing the extra five. If I'm brutal, almost none of these would ever make the cut for a post here. (Lol at any of them caring!) Even the ones I like mostly don't feel exceptional and most of the others are so far out of my remit I can't pretend I even know if they're good examples of their style or not

The prime exceptions are Chloe Slater and George Houston. It was worth going through the rest just to discover those two.  24 Hours I think is both a wonderful song and a super-clever video. The first time I heard it (I've listened to it half a dozen times now.) I didn't get the irony, as you might get from the notes I made. Then the second time I read the lyrics and realized what was going on. 

I still kinda wish it was what I thought - a preppy, rich girl flaunting her privilege - just for how gloriously, nuanced that would make it as a pick for Glastonbury. I get it now and it would still be very meta. I'm not entirely sure why everything on the wall is backwards, though. Does that signify something or did Chloe literally film the whole thing in a mirror? 

As for George, as I said last time, I think he's going to be a big star. I'm pretty sure he thinks so, too. He'd go down a storm on a festival stage although maybe storm isn't exactly the metaphor I'm after.

Good luck to both of them. And to all the other eighty-three acts. Or is it eighty-five?

Still not sure about that.

Selection Bias

If there's one thing watching sixty-five hopefuls, all supposedly at the apex of their potential before breaking out, has taught me it's that standing out from the crowd is hard. I'm more than two-thirds of the way through the ninety acts on this year's Glastonbury Emerging Talent list and so far I can actually remember about three or four of them. 

There's a general level of competence, commitment and authenticity that makes almost every one seem worthwhile but memorable most of them are not. It's also extremely hard to be original these days, assuming anyone even wants to try. I've spoken before about the invidiousness of comparisons but it's all but impossible to tune out the recognition signal every time I hear a particular bass sound or vocal inflection.

That's by way of an introduction to a post that doesn't feature any of those acts. We'll get to the second half of the list when I've made it through the last twenty-five, which is probably not going to happen until next week since I'm working three days out of four from tomorrow. I dunno. I might get it done for Sunday. We'll see.

Today, though, it's the good stuff. A curated selection of the best of everything I've seen, heard and listened to with pleasure over the last couple of weeks. Honestly, it's a relief to get back to it. Sometimes when I put these posts together I wonder if I'm just imagining a level of quality that isn't really there. Having something to scale by has been helpful and instructive in convincing me otherwise.

This really is the good stuff!

Obsessed  - Olivia Rodrigo

Absolutely no apologies for leading with Olivia yet again. She just has the best pop-rock edge right now and this is everything that makes her so great, all packaged up together for instant thrills. The tamped-back, half-spoken verse, the stomping, glam-chant chorus, the vicious, lyrical bile, the mini-movie presentation...

How long she can work this rich seam is another question but it's clearly a long way from being mined out yet. My only complaint is the way these fantastic songs keep arriving, of the new album but not on it. All the big stars do it and I realize it's a sound commercial choice but it's really annoying. I mean, I waited a few months before I got the album and I still didn't get all the songs.

Then again, that's what I get for going hard copy, I guess. And it's not like I'm going to play it anyway. Even I don't listen to music that way any more.

Anthems For A Seventeen Year-Old Girl - Yeule

Yeule was one of my big discoveries of last year. This is a cover of a song by another band I'm only just starting to investigate, Broken Social Scene. I've known the name for a long, long time. I used it as the title of my twelfth-ever post here, all the way back in September 2011, when I linked to the Canadian collective's magisterial cover of Joy Division's classic, Love Will Tear Us Apart. Oh, look. I've done it again.

Despite that, it's taken me the best part of a dozen years to get around to looking at any of their own work. It didn't help that I kept confusing them with Britpop also-rans, Ocean Colour Scene and no, I'm not going to link to anything by them. There are limits.

After I heard Yeule's gloriously fuzzed-up, glitched out take (Which sounds deeply reminiscent of Superorganism in parts, a similarity that lies in the song itself, not Yeule's interpretation.) I wanted to hear the original. I'm not going say which is better. They're both just wonderful. Here, decide for yourself, why don't you?

Anthems For A Seventeen Year-Old Girl  

Broken Social Scene

I dunno... there's an argument for saying Yeule actually cleaned the mix up. There are some storming live performances of this one on YouTube, many featuring guest vocalists and players, the most astonishing of which has Tracey Ullman and Meryl Streep joining in.

There's a lot of very good music comes out of Canada...

Let It Go - American Culture feat. Midwife

But not this. These guys are not Canadian. I was kinda hoping they might be for the irony but they're actually from Denver. The "singer" reminds me of Gerard Langley from The Blue Aeroplanes, not just in the spoken delivery but he actually looks quite like him. Come to think of it, the guitar churn doesn't sound that dissimilar to the Aeroplanes on their epic, set-closing cover of Tom Verlaine's Breaking In My Heart. I am a sucker for that cyclical rhythm.

 Empty And Silent

Mount Kimbie feat. King Krule

I've never really gotten on with King Krule as well as I felt I should. This is magical, though. The way his voice has been mixed makes it feel so rich and resonant and definitely less scary than usual. It blends perfectly with the slithering post-rock guitar and the stratospherically-attenuated backing vocals. 

As for the video, it's one of the kind I'm starting to favor above a lot of the rest. It looks like someone's phone footage run through a filter, which is probably what it is, and it gets out of the way of the music while also adding something to it. I like the square polaroid frame, too. Seeing more and more of those these days. I might have to start thinking about not resizing those. 

The Donkey - Couch Slut

I don't generally listen to a lot of this kind of thing but for some reason I have been lately. Like many initially unpleasant experiences, if you persist, you build up a tolerance. Whether that's a good thing or not I wouldn't like to say. 

Obviously this reminds me of Suicidal Tendencies but also of quite a few other things. The Gift, for one. This is the "abridged" version, apparently. I haven't taken the trouble to seek out the full thing, if it does in fact exist. I suspect it may not, the abridgement being part of some elaborate joke.

Oh, probably should mention it's NSFW to a degree, although I suspect if anyone is actually in the habit of playing this sort of thing at work, this particular track  is going to be completely acceptable, not to say mild.

Satan Loves You - Chloë Doucet 

I mean, you have to wonder what goes on in some peoples' heads sometimes, don't you? And she looks like such a nice girl, too...

XXL - Young Posse

Now, see, if I was half as clever as I think I am, I'd have programmed this right after American Culture. That might have broken my irony limit for a single post though.

Two million views in two days... hmm. Do I see the next retro-boom hoving into view in the form of 90s hip-hop? I bloody well hope so!

Ketamine - Playboi Carti

That was hip-hop as it was then. This is hip-hop as it is now.

Something Ether - Lil Yachty

Or maybe it's this.

Actually, I have no idea what hip-hop is supposed to sound like in 2024. Or if what we just heard even qualifies. I didn't need to warn anyone about those two, anyway, right? No-one got fired?

Probably time we all calmed down.

Cole St. - Dogs On Shady Lane

There! Doesn't that feel better? This was one of the very few interesting things I found while I was digging through the old submissions piles from last year's NPR Tiny Desk Contest. If I thought the Glasto ETC was a bit uninspiring, boy did that put things into perspective.

Mostly it's the band names or the song titles that do the heavy lifting when it comes to choosing what I will or won't click, which is why I bothered to check this. Going through long lists item by item, looking at innocuous names and unremarkable titles, it very much bears the theory out - routine names tend to produce routine tunes.

I Keep Changing - h. pruz

At this point I ought to slot in someone with a dull name doing an amzing song because naturally there are exceptions. I tried, but this is the nearest I could find and h. pruz all in lower case isn't really that dull. Nor is the title, for that matter. Not really making my case here, am I?

It's about now I usually start wishing I'd saved a banger for last. Then again, I tend to assume there's going to be no-one left by now, which is why I try to front-load the best stuff (And the popular stuff.) these days. 

Still, you gotta have an ending. I found this while I was researching the Steve Harley obituary, in which I stubbornly declined even to mention his most famous song. That was mostly because I felt it had come to overshadow the rest of his work to an uncomfortable extent, although it is objectively one of the best pop songs of all time.

There have been several high-profile covers of it, a few of which were hits, but this tops them all. And I'd never heard it until this week. Take us home, Suzi...

Make Me Smile (Come Up And See Me) 

 Suzi Quatro

Two In A Tower

It took me a while but this morning I finally got around to trying out EverQuest's 25th Anniversary Tower. It does have a more impressive, less lore-breaking name inside the game itself but "Anniversary Tower" is what the press release called it back in January and that's the name I have stuck in my mind.

I went to take a look at it just about as soon as it appeared but there was an access quest I didn't want to get involved with just then and what with Palworld, Nightingale and everything else it's taken me this long to find the right moment to do something about it. Ever the way with EverQuest. Even when we're talking about something as low-key as an anniversary event, you don't just pile in. Bad things happen when you do that.

So, anyway, after my second death this morning...

Tell you what. Why don't we begin at the beginning? 

When I went to log in right after breakfast, the first thing I had to decide was which character was going to be my guinea-pig for the day. I'd done a little reading in advance and it seemed the rewards might be worth having for a casual solo player like myself. Sure, the raiders were all complaining there was nothing in it for them but there were some "Thank-you, Darkpaw" notes from F2P players too.

The event scales to level so I could have called on any of my three dozen or so characters but it seemed like it might be best to take what passes for my "main" character these days, my level 115 Magician. I logged her in but even before I got started I ran into the usual problem I encounter every time I go to play her - her buffs.

For about the past two years she's been standing in the Guild Lobby, right in the middle of The Pile. The Pile is the spot where everyone leaves their characters so they can soak up the Mass Group Buffs generous players often cast before they log out for the day. 

As a result, Magmia, my Mage, is raid-buffed to an alarming degree and I daren't take her out of the Guild Lobby,  Plane of Knowledge or The Bazaar, zones where time stands still and buffs never run out, unless I know I'm going to do some serious leveling. Since she can't gain any more XP until I buy the most recent expansion and unlock ten more levels, that means she's pretty much grounded.

I thought about it for a while, then I said "Sod it! Cassis is already there. She can do it!" And that, I guess, is how she comes to have 116 hours played.

Knowing the event scales to level, I wasn't expecting too much trouble. I'd read that behind each tower door lay nothing more than a single room with five mobs, each of which could be fought separately. Most of the comments I'd read were complaining about how unchallenging it was and speculating about how it must have been put together an intern on their first day.

I also knew the access quest was a scavenger hunt, another reason I picked Cassis for the job. If you're going to go zone-hopping around Norrath, a Druid is your first choice. Well, unless you have a Wizard, maybe, but I'd still go Druid for the speed.

As it turns out, the scavenger hunt for each floor takes place in a single zone so there wasn't all that much porting required. Still more than you'd think, though, albeit for reasons more related to my own lack of preparedness than anything to do with quest design.

Playing EverQuest is like riding a bike... so long as you were riding a bike last Tuesday. It does all come back to you, eventually. It's just that there's a lot of it to come back and it might take a while. In my case today it took about an hour and a half and a couple of deaths.

Fortunately, death isn't what it was in Norrath. The days of corpse runs are long gone and even significant  XP loss seems to be a thing of the past. I'm not saying there is none - just that I died twice in a session and still came out half a level ahead.

In EQ you always expect to die but both Cassis' deaths were very unexpected. And entirely my fault for making several newbie mistakes, the worst of which was starting off thinking it was going to be straightforward. It's never straightforward. Nothing in EverQuest is.

I logged Cassis in, ran down the sands to the tower and took the teleport inside I spoke to the Merchant to get the quest and realized she didn't give it. There was no-one else to ask so I figured it might trigger when you click the door. I went up the ramp to the first entrance, where I spotted a blue ball of light on the floor. I clicked on that only to find I couldn't pick it up because my bags were full.

Absolutely typical first day back. Also why I picked a Druid for the job. I found something in my bags I could live without, got rid of it to make space, picked up the ball of light and watched it turn into a "Broken Key of Sands". I had two bag slots with single items blocking them so stashed one in the only other space left and put the Broken Key in the bag slot where I wouldn't lose it. 

Since I knew I was about to do a scavenger hunt, I thought I'd better make some more space for whatever I was going to have to bring back. I memmed Ring of Knowledge, ported back, turned myself into a wolf for the run-speed, loped over to the Tinkering vendor, bought two ten-slot Toolboxes and then couldn't find them. No error message saying I didn't have space, nothing on my cursor... turned out the "Key" I'd picked up was actually a three-slot box and both the new Toolboxes had gone in there because in EQ you can put a container inside a container.

With that sorted out, I went to the bank and stashed a bunch of stuff I have no idea what to do with in my vault alongside all the rest of the stuff I have no idea what to do with and then I had plenty of space. I memmed Ring of Ro and ported back down to the desert. 

The quest told me to check the orc camps in the south-east so I ran up there. Porting had wiped my wolf illusion so I cast good old Spirit of Wolf instead, plus Levitate for good measure. I could see the orc camps on the map (EQMaps add-on. Essential.) although I knew from memory where they were anyway. I figured they'd be about level 9 so I'd be able to stroll into their camp, pick up whatever it was I needed for the scavenger hunt and be on my way without a fight.

Yeah. This is EQ. Have you played before?

I trotted into the first camp and an Orc Oracle started casting some dumb orc spell at me. One Starfire and he'd be cinders. Except he wasn't. He shrugged it off and landed Malosi on me, followed by some heavy DoT. I was half health before I realized I was in trouble. 

I dotted him back and he resisted. I tried to root him and he resisted. By this time I was back-pedalling and he was chasing me. I tried to snare him and got a message saying he was immune. I tried to heal myself but Druids don't get good heals for a long time, certainly not at 48. By the time I decided I'd better run away for real it was too late.

Back at my bind in the Guild Lobby I checked to see what damage had been done. Not much, actually. All my stuff - still with me. All my spells - still memmed. All my buffs - still on, not that there were many because I hadn't bothered to buff myself. 

Okay, I know what to expect now, I thought. Let's go again.

Round two went much the same. Well, it did after I pulled an Orc Shaman thinking it was the Oracle and killed it in seconds because that one really was about Level 9. There was no sign of my real target. I wondered if I'd bugged the quest somehow but no, I just needed to go into the camp again to respawn him.

I did better in the rematch but I'd forgotten that they'd fixed DoT stacking a few years back so spells of different levels in the same line no longer add. Higher versions block lower ones so there's no point having both Drones of Doom and Drifting Death memmed. I couldn't stack enough damage to put the Orc down but he had no such issues with me.

Back in the Guild Lobby, I remembered my Merc. I also remembered I had buffs. I got the merc out, buffed him, buffed myself, went back and did it properly. Third time's the charm. With the mercenary tanking and the right spells loaded, I was able to stack fire and magic DoTs, nuke and heal from a safe distance. When I overdid it, which was pretty quickly because I'm out of practice at playing a Druid, I got the Orc rooted and we carried on from there.

The Orc went down and I got his part of the key. Drops, not ground spawns for the scavenger quest, then. Never thought of that.

The quest updated and told me to go look in the Sand Giant camp next. I was apprehensive but the giant was pure melee, which made holding him up with the Merc and Root much safer and easier. He dropped the second piece of the key and the quest moved on to Spectre Isle.

Either the Spectre was the easiest of the three or I was getting my groove back. The Merc and I disposed of the scythe-wielding psychopath with no problems. I put the final part of the key into the container, hit Combine and presto! Completed quest, completed key.

Back in the tower I clicked on the door and nothing happened. I clicked on the key instead and got another quest. Then the door opened. Inside, as promised, I found a single room with five mobs just standing there, glaring at me: two crocodiles, two skeletons and another Spectre.

I thought I'd start with the Spectre so I tried to root him, only to get a message telling me I couldn't attack him at all. Then I noticed my quest had updated. It was telling me to kill the crocs first.

Multiple comments on several forums had led me to believe the fights inside the tower would be almost insultingly easy. They are not. Not if you're an averagely-geared Druid played by an out-of-practice player, anyway.

I won't go through the whole play-by-play but it was tense. Druids tend to like large, open areas with plenty of kiting room. They don't shine in closed rooms with very little space to move around. Even less so when they have to fight mobs that can't be snared.

Still, the crocs weren't too bad. They came one at a time and the Merc had no trouble taunting them. I needed to med after each of them and the Merc needed a heal or two but it was fine.

The skeletons were harder and the whole thing almost fell apart when the second aggroed before the first was done. Luckily the one we were fighting was down to about 10% health so I nuked him hard and we got the other one under control. At the end of that fight, though, Cassis and the Merc both needed a good sit down.

That just left the Spectre, who worryingly conned yellow, meaning he was a level or two higher than us. And he was a bloody handful, let me tell you! 

The fight came down to Cassis frantically chain-healing the Merc with her only halfway-decent heal, Greater Healing, which only gave the Merc back about 5%  health a cast. I tried to keep my two good DoTs on but it was a risk dropping a heal to recast. In the end, it came down to the wire, with the Merc falling when the Specter was at about 5% itself and Cassis was not much better herself.

The scythe was swinging my way and I was casting what looked like it would be my final nuke when the Spectre just up and imploded. The combat log mysteriously reads "a withered memory hits a withered memory for 409 points of magic damage from Sweeping Scythe Slash" so maybe the spook clumsily cut his own head off.

Whatever, I won! I collected my winnings (More event currency.), looked out of the window (Sand.) checked the half-buried treasure chest (A prop.) and zoned out. I did go up a floor to collect the starter for the next access quest but I haven't done anything with it yet. All I know is it's in Lavastorm and they gave me a shovel.

I look forward to seeing what kind of trouble Cassis can dig up for herself next.

I'll See Your 45...

Just to warn everyone, there may be several music posts this week. Actually, since it's Wednesday already, there may only be music posts this week! But hey, it's either that or more Nightingale so what you gonna do?

I was already planning on a regular "What I've Been Listening To Lately" post for Friday because it's been a fortnight since the last one and the damn songs keep piling up. 

(Can we say "fortnight" now without having to explain it, by the way? I feel like, since Fortnite became such a thing, everyone must know what it means. I used to avoid it as a confusing Britishism but like "wanker" it seems to have gone global now. That said, I never did get what Epic thought the pun was supposed to be...)

Anyway, there was that and then yesterday I got sight of this year's long list for the Glastonbury Festival Emerging Talent Competition and for some hard-to-explain (Even to myself.) reason I decided I'd probably better do something on it. I do realise no-one cares but as the years go by the blog seems to be acquiring traditions like that ball in Katamari Damacy picks up objects and I'm nothing if not a traditionalist.

Having made the decision, then naturally I had to listen to them. All ninety! Luckily, there's a playlist showcasing what I assume is the specific song each of them submitted. Or maybe it's just a representative number. I dunno. I haven't read the rules.  

Whatever, it's more than four hours of music. I'm halfway through now and I thought it would be wise to stop there and split this thing into two parts. I also thought it would be fun to make notes as I went and then print them verbatim like a weird kind of time-delayed live blog.

Finally, in case that wasn't convoluted enough, I decided to give them all a grade. Everyone loves a grade, don't they? I mean, I know I do. As a reader, that is. If I was the artist I'd probably want to come round and have a quiet chat with any dick on the internet who thought they could sum up my work with a single letter. And maybe not so quiet, at that.

On that note and on the extremely unlikely chance any of them ever read this, I'd like to offer an up-front apology to anyone I've given what looks like a failing mark to, while taking a moment to explain that all I'm grading is the degree to which these songs did or did not intrigue, impress or excite me. I'm not making any judgments about objective quality. Well, not in the grades. In the comments, though...

Just to nail that down:

The grading process is based for the most part on a first impression from a single play. As we all know, songs and performers can grow on you or you can go off them, so take that under advisement.

A - There might be something special going on here and I advise you not to miss out.

B - I liked it, maybe you will, too. Worth keeping an eye on, for sure.

C - Solid choice if it's your kind of thing. Wasn't really mine.

D - Either made no impression on me or I actively disliked it. Could be either. Check the comment.

E - Really did not like this at all.

Plusses and minuses add nuance but the letter is the prime signifier.

Finally, I've embedded videos for some of the ones I like but for the sake of layout it does depend somewhat on where they fall in the list so I couldn't get all my favorites in. Plus, I pulled my #1 choice out and stuck it in the intro so as not to bury the lede. 

Finally, I did consider adding links to every entry but that would be a lot of work. Just use the playlist provided!

Let's get to it!

1. Who Is Jack - without - 50 seconds until it actually starts! Way too long to get to a dull ballad. - C
2. Marie Naffah - Rust&Blue -  Great video (Says it's a visualiser but it's a video), strong song, vocals sound like they were slowed down (Assume that's just her voice). - A-
3. Saina - Listen to my Voice - nice, unremarkable - C+
4. Slip Martin - Wallflower- dull - C-
5. Ella Tobin - The Ghost - Very pleasant neo-folk. This sort of thing does sound old-fashioned now - B
6. Nate Brazier - Feels - unremarkable - C
7. J Aliya - Not The One - Good. Sonically satisfying. Trippy. - B
   
   
8. Call Me Loop - Self Love - Bouncy! Fun. Kinda old-fashioned but not retro - B
9. Who Ate All The Crayons - 5 Seconds - Annoying melodic indie-rock. Very not like you'd expect from the band name. D
10. Lo Rays - Die Beside You - Sounds like a Eurovision entry - C-
11. Mirrors - Echoes- Pleasant, ordinary. Maybe building to something different but didn't have the patience to wait - C+
12. Talk Show - Closer - alright. Nothing special. - C
13. lau.ra & Surya Sen - Do That - Decent club track. C
14. Bryte - Zongo Boy - Toasting, although I imagine there's another name for it now. Not terrible. - C
15. Daniella Dee - Stutter - Smooth jazz! Sade/Erika Badu etc. Nice! - B
16. Re Teu - Glas - Most original song so far. Couldn't put it in a genre. Starts off kinda dance, goes all post-rock - B+
17. Jessie Reid - Let Your Love Run Cold - More neo-folk or maybe even anti-folk. Mildly reminds me of Peggy Sue. Good. - B+
18. retropxssy - Fading - chill lo-fi hip-hop or something - very much my thing - B+
    
    
19. Room Service - JCVD - Tribute to Jean Claude van Damme - funny in a kind of Pop Will Eat Itself way - very late '80s - Good riff. - B
20. Buoy Meets Krill - Sweetbreads -- quirky indie folk-jazz? - If this makes the short list I'll eat my fox hat - B+
21. Dogsbody - Let It Die - incredibly slow to get going but quite unexpected when the jazz sax appears - Builds nicely but I fear if they were playing live you wouldn't be able to hear most of it for the sound of people chatting - B-
22. Brian Grogan - Your Name - fine of its kind, not my thing at all - C
23. Maddie Ashman - 6AM - more pleasant neo-folk - B
24. Theo Bleak - It's Not Doing Me Any Good - Shoegaze. Pleasant. Unremarkable. Also, it's a band, not a person. - B
25. Meduulla - Limbo feat. The Mouse Outfit - pleasant lo-fi hip-hop - B
26. FINCHES - NOTHING FIXES ME LIKE YOU - Britpop revivalists! Interesting accent. Decent of its kind. - B
    
    
27. Maya Lane - Bump Into Me - Indie, almost twee-folk. Nice video but the van's the wrong color. - B
28. Eighty Eight Miles - Sophie - OMG! See above! So tweefest c. 2016 it's not true. Third on the bill to Camera Obscura - B+
29. Juju - Just Okay - indie/pop-rock not very much to say about it - C
30. George Houston - In Aeternum Vive - ffs! He looks about 12 and the video looks like it was made by 15 year olds for school assembly where they wanted to be as transgressive as they could get away with... and it's all for a really strong, classic-rock vocal performance with striking lyrics. Astonishing. He could be a star, the video already has ten times the views of anything else so far (180k+) - A
    
    
31. Georgia May - Guessin' - lovely R&B - A
32. Joe Winter — Laughing for the West - and more lovely r&b, very 80s except for the heavy auto-tune - B+
33. Frances And The Majesties - All Of Time - synthpop of some stripe, also a bit 80s - C+
34. simon a. - FERMI - slick r&b - smooth! 70s inflected - B
35. E. M Kane - Wasted Time - old school soul/r&b extremely retro - bit of a tour de force vocal, impressive! - B
36. Neckbreakers - Waiting On Your Call- 90s indie-pop - I was listening to it while reading a news feed and I came to write this comment after it finished I literally couldn't remember anything about it and had to go back and hear it again - C
37. alessi rose - eat me alive - good pop music although it's getting so I feel I've heard this same song a lot of times now - B
38. Home Counties - Bethnal Green - post punk pop, mildly frenzied. Weird to hear a band called Home Counties singing a song about Bethnal Green... B
    
    
39. Darla Jade - Broken Armour - more slick pop - B
40. Euan Stamper - Fast Fashion - Ivor Cutler without the jokes. Mesmerising. I really hope he makes the shortlist. - A (I would have embedded it but the video is unlisted on YouTube so you can only see it via the playlist. Or this link.)
41. Tommy Down - Mrs Blue  - old-school(ish) soul/r&b - very nice 90s vibe - reminds me of David Gray - B
42. The Ayoub Sisters - The Scottish Egyptian - Is it folk? Is it classical? Do I care? Way outside my abilty to assess meaningfully - No rating 
43. Kynsy - Simple Life - Wow! One of those songs they don't make any more. Except apparently Kynsy does. Would get radio play across five decades. - B 
44. KID 12- Dreams - Rich, thick sound. Satisfying. Would listen again. - B+ 
45. Olivia Nelson - Oblivion - More solid, professional modern R&B - not much more I can say - B 

Forty-five down, forty-five to go. Geez. Wish me luck.

One Against Many

I am still playing Nightingale. What's more, I'm playing it more than I expected, now I've come to the end of the story. And I'm not entirely sure I'm happy about it.

Angry Onions left a comment on the recent post about the Steam Sale in which he talked about playing just one game at a time, maybe for hundreds of hours. Most people reading that will relate, I'm sure. 

Wilhelm has been running a series in recognition of and response to EverQuest turning twenty-five, in which, among other things, he's been revisiting some of the key locations he remembers from his early days in the game. He's also posted several times on other topics related to the anniversary. I haven't said much about it here, although I've made up for my silence by leaving lengthy, anecdotal comments at TAGN, in part as something of a sop to my own feeling I ought not to be letting such a significant event pass by unacknowledged.

Not that I was ever going to let that happen. It is, after all, an anniversary year for EQ, and although I often mention that I started playing in 1999, it wasn't until November that I finally logged in and made my first character. 

I did think of waiting until my own twenty-fifth anniversary with the game before marking my time there with some sort of celebration here on the blog but that would clash awkwardly with the twentieth anniversary of EverQuest II, which will also arrive in November. I was there for that one. 

I was there before, actually, having been in the closed beta since, I believe, September 2004. No doubt I'll get to the details when the due date arrives but the relevant point here is that back then, when EQ was turning five and EQII had yet to be born, Mrs Bhagpuss and I, along with everyone else in our EQ guild, felt we had to make a choice between one or the other.

And it wasn't the first time. A couple of years before that we'd been through the same thing when Dark Age of Camelot launched. We went through it again with a friend and guild-mate for the launch of Horizons and once more with another friend during the surge in popularity that hit World of Warcraft in 2005. 

In those four examples - and I could quote plenty more - twice we said our goodbyes and left for the chance of something fresh and new, twice we stayed behind and waved goodbye to people we'd spent hundreds of hours with until then. These things happened all the time and although it would have been perfectly practical to keep in touch, even in the days before social media made it hard not to, mostly we never did.

I can't speak for offline games of the period but back then, if you played MMORPGs you tended to play them serially. Very few people tried to play more than one at a time and for good reason. 

Firstly, most required a subscription. That would have been a problem only for the very frugal and those on a strict budget but seeing that a large proportion of the target demographic was made up of players still at school or college, that probably meant most of them. A decade down the line it became quite common to hear veterans boast obnoxiously about their favored financial circumstances but not so much in 1999-2004, even if characters were changing hands on EBay for hundreds of dollars a time back then.

More important than money, though, came time. Doesn't matter how much you have in the bank, you only get the same twenty-four hours in your day as the rest of us. Playing MMORPGs, especially if you took it seriously, as so many did, might as well have been a full-time job. 

It was commonplace for people to play twenty-five hours a week. Forty wasn't considered at all unusual or extreme. I have always tried not to work full-time but for my core EQ/DAOC/EQII years, during which I played very socially, knew lots of people and joined in with all kinds of group and guild activities, I, like almost everyone I played with, was either in full-time employment or full-time education. 

I worked five days a week and still somehow managed to play EQ for 25-40 hours on top. With that level of commitment I was able to hit the level cap on a couple of characters and stay abreast of current group content. Barely. If I'd wanted to kick on and raid or even work on getting my characters into an acceptable state just to to apply to join a raid guild (As Mrs. Bhagpuss did, successfully and, thankfully, briefly.) I think I'd have had to give up sleeping.

The idea of playing two such games simultaneously would have been laughable to most people then, which is why it became such a contentious, emotional issue whenever anyone declared their intention to move to another game. No-one in my experience ever responded to announcement of that kind with "That sounds cool! I'll get it too and we can still hang out!"

You were either on the bus or off it. Guilds made rules about it. Loyalty and responsibility were factors. Even if you were the kind of player who mostly soloed, unless you were a complete loner a new game meant the end of your friends list and back to being the new kid nobody knows.

I was thinking about all of this yesterday, first when I read MassivelyOP's discussion topic about playing MMOs in retirement and later, when I was doing some prep work for the series of posts I'm planning for my aforementioned celebration of the EQ Silver Anniversary. I logged into EQ partly to pick up my Anniversary freebies but also to start collecting /played information on all my characters there.

Both the EverQuest games have a useful function whereby you can see the exact date and time you created your character and how many hours you've spent playing them. Strictly, how many hours the character has been online, I guess. If you were in the habit of going AFK for hours a time as many were, the definition may blur a little, especially if the character was a Bazaar trader.

I didn't even get around to checking the server with my most-played characters so I haven't yet seen the really big numbers. It's probably just as well. The lesser names from the deep past are disturbing enough. Even characters I know I only ever played for a few weeks have /played times measured in days. 

For example, one of my several druids, Cassice, a character I created in 2003 but barely remember playing at all, other than to log her in briefly in recent years to port somewhere and take a few screenshots for a blog post, somehow made it to Level 48, racking up almost five days online.

To put that in perspective, if Cassice was a Steam game, at 116 hours she'd be third on my Hours Played list after only Valheim and New World. It would be one thing if all that time spent came with a fund of anecdotes, amusing stories, or emotional memories but I can't fricken' recall a single time I ever played her! And she's just one minor character out of literally dozens. 

That was how MMORPGs were. Even now, although progress is much faster, they still eat up relatively large chunks of time compared to other genres. It may only take a couple of weeks to hit cap where once it took months but that's only the start. 

The idea that these games are more casual and require less commitment only really stands up if you play them the way I was describing earlier. Where it took me hundreds of hours just to reach the level cap back in 2003, now I could do it in most MMORPGs in a few sessions. Even in EverQuest, provided I could get groups for the last 35 levels. That, though, would just be the start.

Back then, it was entirely possible to make leveling the point of playing. Lots of people never made it to the cap and even those who did often just started over on another character. Modern MMORPGs tend to have all the grind at the cap, not before it, which may be why it's now so tempting to play lots of them, either serially in short bursts or even all at once. 

A big part of the attraction of the genre has always been the sense of satisfaction that comes from progression. The Ding Effect, if you will. That's why Tipa named her blog Chasing Dings, I imagine. Game hopping, now that leveling is so accelerated, gives you those dings in spades but when the levels run out, you have to figure out where the next dopamine hit's going to come from and it can be disheartening to realize it's going to involve a hell of a lot of one kind of grind or another. 

Much easier just to jump ship to the Next Big Thing because, after all, what did you commit to? Nothing.

Survival games package up a lot of that progression-satisfaction into tidy packages. Easy to understand, easy to achieve, they just keep on coming. It's very smart design. I suspect if we could see the numbers we'd find people stick around longer in new survival games than they do in new MMORPGs, even if both lose almost everyone in a matter of months. 

Nightingale feels particularly slippery in this respect. I was expecting to be done with it not long after I made it to The Watch and the end of what story there is in this Early Access build. That has not happened. I'm still playing several hours a day and even as I type this I'm itching to play some more.

It would be an exaggeration to say Nightingale has an endgame right now. As far as I can tell, there's no equivalent of raiding or stepped-difficulty dungeons to gear up for and take on. Instead, there's the genuine sandbox of infinite Realms, each different from the rest yet none of them as different as all that. 

That, however, is not what's holding me. It's the crafting. It's tricksy. As I explained a while ago, there may be only quality grades but there are also a number of sets (I don't know for sure how many.) plus some single pieces and as I am only now discovering, the sets have their own baseline stats that put them into some sort of hierarchy. 

This means that if you imagine, as I did, that you're done once you've upgraded all your gear to Epic you are very much mistaken. All you have is the epic version of whatever set you started with. If there's a better set, the epic version of that will be better too.

Since upgrading each piece requires forty essences from each of three tiers and since these essences cannot be recovered by salvaging the item (That just nets you Essence Dust.), every time you discover a recipe for a potentially superior set of gear, you have to begin again from Common and work your way back up to Epic.

That would be time-consuming enough but in Nightingale, materials come with stats that can be passed on to the items they make. It's a confusing process I don't claim to understand in full but I do know that if you genuinely want to have the best gear, you're going to have to acquire some very specific materials and combine them in some very specific ways. At the least, it involves hunting named creatures for Fabled materials and crafting particular Realms with perks that generate rare gems. 

There's probably a lot more to it than that, I imagine, but I'm hitting a plateau in my ability to care. I like the exploring, the gathering, the hunting, the crafting and the general ambience and I get a dingish buzz out of making new items and upgrading them but...

...increasingly I'm finding myself wondering "What is the point?" it's a very dangerous question to ask about any video game but especially about the kind that rely on gear-based vertical progression to hook you in. In MMORPGs, though, there's generally at least a token purpose to it. You need the better gear to do the harder content where you get the better-still gear to do the even-harder content....

Nightingale doesn't have that. And without an appearance system, it doesn't really have much of a stake in the fashion wars endgame, either. Thanks to the The Watch, there is the potential to strut around like a peacock, daring everyone to ask you how you managed to get yourself looking so fantabulous, but even there, in a game with no player economy, no broker, no bank system and no social structure to speak of, the opportunities to catwalk your way to fame are limited.

All the same, it is that minimal interaction with other players that just about allows me to think of what I'm doing as purposeful. Other players can see what you're wearing and everyone displays a gear score next to their name. I'm doing a few Vault runs every day and I feel some small obligation to contribute. I don't mind the occasional carry but it gets embarrassing if it happens every time. To that end, I can convince myself that continuing to upgrade my gear is socially responsible rather than some kind of nervous tick I can't suppress.

Without that fig-leaf, I'm not sure I would carry on playing. The prospect of taking the game offline, as so many have apparently demanded, seems to me to be almost surreally misguided. Other than to speed up zoning and avoid disconnections, something that could presumably be achieved with better network code and hardware, why would you want to remove the one and only objective reason for continuing after the story ends?

I could give a few answers to my own question there but I'm not going to bother. I'm a little concerned that I'm pulling too hard already on a thread that could unravel the entire tapestry. Almost a quarter of a century after I came home from work carrying that original EverQuest box, I'm finally starting to wonder if I'm getting too old for all this.

Not because I can't perform physically. I may be stiffer and slower but I can still handle most of what I ever could in an MMORPG or similar. Not because I've lost interest, either. This length of this post is ample evidence of that. No, the problem, if it is one, is that I find myself thinking more often of what else I could be doing with the time instead.

Ironically, that's less of an issue when I'm jumping between games, uncommitted, searching, scratching around for something that will hold my attention for an hour or two. Then, gaming feels like a perfectly reasonable part of a varied entertainment diet. It's only when something digs its claws in and won't let go, like all those old MMORPGs did once and like Nightingale threatens to do now, that I start to feel uncomfortable.

I never really felt that way when I was playing MMORPGs, even though objectively I spent far longer doing it than I have done or ever will do with survival games. It's because in an MMO, the presence of thousands of other players, many of whom who I can actually see or hear all around me as I play, normalizes things. It can't be so bad if everyone else is doing it, right?

Once you take all that striving and grinding into the private sphere, it becomes a lot harder to see it as benign, I think. Which is why, for my offline gaming, I prefer to narrative experiences with a clear ending. 

If I'm going to be doing something that's a completely pointless waste of time, at least I'd like some company while I'm doing it.

Death Trip

Although I said I didn't want to turn this blog into an obituary column, I probably need to recognise that the road is about to run out for most of the significant names from my teens and twenties. I try my best not to give in to nostalgia but there's ample evidence now that biology plays a part, too, and that's less easily shurugged aside. 

Even if that wasn't true, I am literally sitting here typing this while looking at a visual reminder. There's a faded satin scarf strung across the wall behind the monitor that's been there since we moved into this house thirty years ago. Most of it is obscured now by stacks of books but the part still showing reads "Steve Harley And Cockney R..."

Steve Harley died yesterday at the age of 73. It was a shock in a way although as I said in reply to my ex-wife, who sent me a link to the news, I'm always a little surprised when any old rocker makes it past sixty. They really didn't hold back in the seventies and eighties and it catches up with most of them eventually.

In my teens, Cockney Rebel came very close to being my favorite band. I first heard them through the scratchy, fading signal of Radio Luxembourg in 1973, when the band's first single, the magnificently overwrought epic Sebastian, became a hit all across Europe. 

It was then and remains now one of my favorite songs of all time, although as with all such favorites, I almost never listen to it. The more you listen, the less you hear. You have to pace yourself if you want to live with a song forever.

I bought the first album as soon as it came out a few months later and played it incessantly and melodramatically, as we all did with our favorites in those days. Cockney Rebel came several times to play in the city where I lived  over the next couple of years. Bands, even quite successful ones, used to come round and round on a kind of musical conveyor belt back then, which is one reason I rarely found it necessary to to travel far to see any of them. If they couldn't be bothered to come to me...

The first time they played, I saw a card on the noticeboard of the super-hip record shop I was almost too nervous to go into, asking for volunteers to come hump gear for the band in return for a free ticket and beer. I was a bit too young for that but I've always kind of wished I'd offered my services anyway. It would be a story.

The next time, they'd had a few hits in the UK and had upgraded from clubs to concert halls. I went to that one. The thing I remember most about the gig isn't anything from the performance. It's the row of stalls outside the venue selling scarves and tees and badges and who knows what else. 

It was the first time I'd really noticed anyone selling "merch", as we definitely didn't call it then. I imagine it was beneath the likes of Hawkwind, Yes or Pink Floyd, the kind of bands I was used to going to see. By their standards, Cockney Rebel was almost a pop group. 

So I bought a scarf. I mean, why not. I doubt I was even being ironic. And I wore it for the gig and when the band got to Tumbling Down, the epic number (All Steve Harley's songs were epics) that ended with the whole audience singing the chorus for what seemed like hours, I held my scarf above my head and swayed from side to side along with everyone else.

I'm not going to say it was magical. But it was.

The next year, I saw them again at the same venue. By this time they were on their fourth album and Steve had gone weird. Weirder, I should say. It's not like he wasn't weird to begin with but now he was heavily into Rosicrucianism along with everything else. 

The whole sound of the band (The second iteration of Cockney Rebel, after he sacked most of the first line-up) had changed almost out of recognition, from Bowiesque glam to a funkier groove that somehow managed to feel dry and swamp-ridden all at the same time. Out of all expectation, I loved it. 

Cockney Rebel released five studio albums in the 1970s before calling it a day until Steve got the band back together a good few years later, when they recorded one more. The first two were released under the band name alone, the others as Steve Harley And Cockney Rebel. 

Of those six albums, the first - The Human Menagerie - is an acknowledged classic, while the rest are generally considered at best hit or miss. I like the second (The Psychomodo) and the third (Best Years Of Our Lives) a lot but they aren't entirely coherent. They each have a couple of his best songs but also some undeniable filler. The fifth, Love's A Prima Donna, is not great and the much later sixth album I have never heard.

The fourth, Timeless Flight, was not well-received at the time and I'm not sure what its critical reputation is now. It is, however, one of my favorite albums. I listened to it a very great number of times back when I used to play vinyl but unlike The Human Menagerie, which was the first album I bought on CD, I never thought to upgrade. 

I have, however, listened to some of the tracks online, now and again, and relatively recently (By which I mean in the last decade.) and I think it stands up pretty well. I have All Men Are Hungry on in the background as I type and it sounds great, still. What it's about I have no more idea now than I ever did although I do now realise it has something to do with Hemingway...

That's the thing with Steve Harley. He was a striking lyricist, famous for it, and yet rarely did I know what he was trying to say. He was so fin de siecle you couldn't make out the meaning for the brocade.

It didn't matter. It never mattered. As he once said of Sebastian, "It's poetry. It means what you want it to mean... I can't define its meaning. It's like most poetry, it's a lovely word." He made his method even clearer in another interview "'Sebastian' is possibly a sort of Gothic love song, possibly not: I'm not really sure to be honest."

If Steve didn't know what his songs were about, I don't know why we should be expected to. What always mattered with his work was the imagery and the emotion. That was a powerful narcotic to an adolescent and it hit me hard enough the bruise hasn't faded yet.

Thanks for all the memories, Steve. Like your songs, they've lasted well.

Awkward Interregnum

Regular readers may have noticed a marked absence anything to do with AI here at Inventory Full lately. It's not just that there haven't been any posts specifically about the technology or the cultural phenomenon or the underlying concepts; there also haven't been any AI-generated illustrations necessitating end credits listing prompts and models.

It's not a change of policy. Nor is it a reaction to the low-level pushback AI occasionally generates. It's a lot simpler than any of that. I just got bored with it.

Not with the potential. I still find that thrilling. It's more like what happened with VR. There, I was never remotely convinced or impressed by the claims being made, a position I think has been borne out by experience. With AI, I did think something was genuinely about to happen.

And it probably will, one day. The thing about AI as it stands now, though is...

It's not AI.

I mean, we all know that, don't we? No-one really believes anything we're seeing or hearing about is intelligent, artificially or otherwise, surely? 

Calling any of it AI is confusing, misleading and increasingly annoying. It's gone from a promise to a buzz-word to a cliche in just a couple of years. 

Unfortunately, labels stick and AI is the label attached to the disparate collection of algorithms, apps and processes currently drenching the media and drowning all coherent thought, so I guess we're stuck with it too. Since we've used up the acronym on what's effectively nothing more paradigm-shifting than a bunch of productivity software, what we're going to call any genuinely intelligent artificial entity when or if it ever appears, I have no idea. 

Master, probably. Or God. 

That, however, is a problem for another day. More likely, another century. For now, we're all going to carry on using the thick-headed shorthand we've been handed so let's just try and make the best of it.

It's not very useful

I mean, it isn't, is it? Let's be honest. Everyone in this part of the blogosphere who's experimented with AI has reported back with overwhelming evidence of inaccuracy. 

The AIs that are really Large Language Modules have been designed and developed to build sentences and paragraphs by extrapolating the next most likely word in a sequence, based on the petabytes of data fed to them from trawls of the internet, authorized or otherwise. That allows for an initially astonishing impersonation of something a person might write but it has very little to do with fact and even less to do with truth.

The tech giants behind all of this are doing their damnedest to force these systems to comply but by my own experience I'd have to say they aren't getting very far. The main reason I'm not using ChatGPT or Bard (Now Gemini, for reasons.) or whatever the other one is called is that it actually takes me longer to put a post together with any of them than it does to do it the old-fashioned way.

That's because I have to fact-check everything they tell me before I can risk publishing it, unless I'm just using the output for humor, in which case the less accurate it is, the better for me. Otherwise, I have to put everything I don't know to be true through Google Search, at which point I clearly could just have searched for the information that way to begin with and saved myself a step.

It's widely reported that Google Search has deteriorated of late but it still seems reasonably precise to me. I can always find what I want, even if what I want is frequently on Reddit. Moreover, the whole supposed benefit of using AI to search, which being that you can communicate with it in normal, conversational English, is what I've been doing with Google Search since the early 2000s.

I learned correct internet search practices way back in the 1990s but I haven't bothered to use what I learned since Google made it optional. Google Search easily parses full sentence queries and returns highly appropriate search results, so what value does AI add other than a fatuous "Thank you" at the end?

It's not funny any more.

I guess whether AI was ever funny is a matter of taste but it used to make me laugh out loud, sometimes uncontrollably. I found the nonsensical non-sequiturs all kinds of amusing - charming, whimsical, sweet - and the warped, weird images delightful. 

Two things have happened to blunt those positive impressions. The AIs have gotten much better at faking being human and the novelty has worn off. 

The second is probably the more damaging. Jokes aren't funny when you've heard them lots of times before. 

I follow Janelle Shae's excellent blog AI Weirdness, in which she tests to destruction the capacity of various AIs to follow simple instructions. When I first started reading it I had to be careful not to have a cup of coffee in hand when I opened a new post in case I laughed so much I spat it all over the keyboard. Now most posts barely raise a tired smile. Seen one mislabeled animal, you've seen them all.

Janelle still seems to get a laugh out of them but I fear she's having more trouble with the first problem. These days the AIs tend to give her something a lot closer to what she's asking for than they did a year or two ago. She has to push them harder to fail in a humorous way. That does suggest at least a move towards usefulness but it also diminishes what made the results so fascinating before - their inhuman alienness. 

The pictures all look the same.

Not literally. That would be interesting. No, what I mean is that as the AI Image Models become more and more sophisticated, the results seem to have acquired something of an AI imprimatur. You can look at an image and immediately sense it was created by AI. Just not, unfortunately, in what I used to think of as the good way.

There were two things I liked about making pictures using AI. Firstly, it meant I could imagine I could draw. Secondly, all the pictures looked bizarre.

I can't draw. Never have been able to. All my friends can draw, even the ones who really can't. Drawing is weird. If you believe you can do it, you can do it and other people believe you can, too. I never believed it so I can't draw and absolutely no-one ever thought I could.

If you look back at the earlier AI images on the blog, they are horrific. Warped, distorted, unnatural, freakish. That was what I liked about them. If I use NightCafe to make images now, they're almost proper pictures. Sometimes they're very good. Sometimes they're just a tiny bit off. Occasionally they're very poor but never in an interesting way.

Whatever they are, though, they're clearly not "my" pictures any more. Not in the way they were when the people in them had three arms. These all look like commercial art. I like commercial art well enough in its place but I don't aspire to using it here. It's too slick and corporate and functional for a funky, home-made blog.

It's nowhere near ready yet.

I've said this before but I'll reiterate: I want to be able to press a couple of buttons and have a complete blog post appear, indistinguishable from something I could write myself. Better still, I want to type in a short plot synopsis and have an original story as good as most of the proofs of novels I take home from work. (Seriously, it's not that high a bar...) 

In other fields, I'd like something that could generate animated cartoons or CGI movies as good as the ones I watch already, just from a few brief instructions in plain English. Most of all, I'd like a small device I could clip to Beryl's collar that would talk back to me, convincingly, in her voice while we're out walking.

None of this is currently available or even possible, although if you follow AI reporting in the media you absolutely could believe it was. It reminds me very strongly of the early days of VR, when everything seemed to suggest we'd all be running around inside the Star Trek HoloDeck by Christmas.

About the only thing the media gets right about AI is a that it's a highly disruptive technology. The problem is, until it gets a lot better, the kind of disruption it causes isn't going to be the supposed cultural reformatting that might or might not lead to a genuinely different, maybe even better, future; it's going to be the kind of disruption you'd get if you released a swarm of killer bees into a crowded shopping mall.

And that's why there's not much AI on this blog right now. I reserve the right to go back to covering the phenomenon should anything interesting develop - I am still keeping an eye on it and it is a fast-changing field, although most of it isn't changing anything like as fast as I'd like. 

Right now, though, it feels like there's nothing much to say about AI that hasn't been said too often already. When there's something to talk about, then we'll talk.

I will still use some AI images if I find it convenient or appropriate (Obviously I was always going to use some for this post.) but honestly I'm getting a lot more fun out of going old school and running screen grabs through an image processing app until they distort to the point of unrecognizeability.

I may also do some more experiments with the LLMs just to keep an eye on progress there. If they ever start to return consistently accurate results I would be interested in using them as research assistants. If that happens, though, it'll probably be the last I ever write about them. At that point, they'll become about as interesting as spell checkers or email clients. I mean, I use a spell-checker on every post but I don't feel the need to tell anyone about it.

As for my dabbling with audio and video, unless and until there are some very major advances, I can't see that continuing. It takes ages and I get nothing interesting out of it. Right now, AI in those fields is probably at the stage of becoming a useful tool for professionals. The day when the ungifted amateur can produce satisfying, convincing results for almost no effort is far, far away.

As for all the other things we also call AI, like the kinds of procedural generation used in virtual worlds or the way mobs follow a path or fight in an MMORPG or even the app I use to remove parts of an image and refill it with something unnoticeable, well no-one's really talking about any of that when they use the jargon these days, are they? I imagine that although PR people will try hard to convince us otherwise, all of that will carry on much as before without any of us needing to pay much attention.

I think that about covers it.

Oh, wait! I haven't even mentioned Artificial Insemination...