It's Life, Jim...

Chris Neal at MassivelyOP raised an interesting question ths weekend, when he asked whatever happened to Atlas, the piratical MMO that went into Early Access all the way back in 2018 and never came out the other side. I bought it shortly after it became available and posted some extensive First Impressions (1, 2, 3, and 4.) based on the week I spent there, after which I pretty much never set foot in the game again.

In fact, according to Steam, my total playtime in Atlas comes to less than seven hours. I currently don't even have it installed. I suppose I should probably be annoyed I ever bought it or even blame Wildcard, the developer, for not making good on the gameplay they promised, but I don't.

When I stopped playing after just a week I was optimistic:

"I'm still very happy to have bought and tried it. Atlas's journey has barely begun. It's going to be around for a long time.  If - when - things change, I'll be back to give it another look."

Things did change. A lot. From what I remember, Wildcard were everlastingly messing around with both the premise and the practicalities. But I still never came back.

There were a few reasons for that. For one thing, I'm never wholly comfortable playing pirates. Partly it's the way piracy has been gentrified from a bleak, brutal, amoral reality into a colorful, cheerful, child-friendly fantasy but honestly that happens to everything in MMORPGs, from bears to battles, so why pick on pirates? 

No, mostly it's that pirates are just boring.

I mean, look at them. What do they actually do in games? Sail around in big, wooden boats that are always really hard to steer. Wave cutlasses and fire flintlocks. Wander about the docks in floppy hats with feathers in, looking for work. 

On a good day they sometimes get to go Yar! and swig some rum. It doesn't really cut it in the adventure stakes, compared to flying over snow-capped mountains on a griffon or delving into the depths of a forgotten elven city, buried for aeons under the shifting sands, now does it?

They also seem to be everlastingly wandering along barren, empty beaches, looking for buried treasure that they rarely find. Or carrying crates they never get to open from one forlorn port authority shack to another. If they're lucky they sail across a millpond-flat sea without incident, which is about as exciting as it sounds. If not they have to fight with other pirates ships or naval vessels, which inevitably means going round and round in circles until one of them sinks. Or they have to run from storms, in which they're either shipwrecked or end up stuck in port trying to fix the damage.

Is that fun? I never thought so. I haven't bothered to re-read my First Impressions posts but as far as I recall, what I most liked about Atlas were the parts where you could just be on land doing regular MMORPG stuff, from which I'd have to conclude the pirate theme wasn't really adding much.

But believe it or not, I didn't begin this post intending to re-review Atlas or indulge in a rant about how boring pirates can be. I wanted to address something Chris said towards the end of his piece, namely that the game "looks to have been pushed to the furthest back burner possible". In other words, Atlas has entered maintenance mode.

This loops back around to the controversial topic of game preservation, a horse I am nowhere near done beating to death. Prefacing the previously quoted comment and referring to the people still playing Atlas, Chris says, with admirable nuance, "The fact that it’s still online is probably a benefit to those holdouts."

I do like that "probably". It's a short piece but he manages to make it perfectly clear that the possibility that what Atlas really needs is a decisive and merciful ending can't be ruled out. The game has been in Early Access for more than five years, during which time I seem to recall it being radically revamped and re-promoted at least once, possibly more, without ever arriving at a state anyone cared to call "done".

If it's true the game's owners and developers  have lost interest in it completely, in whose interest does it remain up and running? Does it need to sit there, indefinitely, in a playable condition, regardless of any commercial value, for as long as even one person who bought the imaginary box still retains a fitful interest in logging in?

Wilhelm took Ubisoft to task recently for the cavalier way that company chose to handle a similar issue with its racing game The Crew. Few rational people would defend Ubisoft for anything, and I certainly don't want to give the impression I approve of what they've done, are doing or most likely ever will do, so I have to tread carefully here, but as someone who once paid real money for the Crew I really couldn't care less if they switch the damn servers off. 

Of course, from a purely personal perspective, it's very much a moot point. I liked the Crew, what very little I ever saw of it, but it holds what I think may be a unique position among every game I have ever bought in that it's the only one where I literally and without any exaggeration could not get past the Tutorial.

I found the car so impossible to control I couldn't pass the game's very lenient safety check to be allowed to drive freely on the open road. All I ever saw of the world was the introduction and the first few cut scenes. I suppose it's possible I might feel more miffed about the news that I won't be able to play the game I bought in the future if I'd actually ever been able to play it in the past.

On balance, though, I think I had my chance. I bought the Crew nine years ago. I posted about it once. That I wasn't good enough at driving games to get any more use out of it is on me but even if I'd been a first-rate imaginary racer, I can't but feel nine years free access would have allowed me to get my money's worth. 

If we accept for the moment, nonetheless, that the general feeling is that online games should have persistence beyond their natural, commercial life, it does raise a very curious conundrum concerning what quality of life we consider worthwhile. Might there be some conflict between the concerns expressed whenever an online game becomes wholly unavailable and the somewhat similar expressions of dismay that greet a game going into maintenance mode?

Getting back to Atlas, if, as Chris's article suggests, some current players are quite satisfied with how much there is to do in the game right now, why is it a problem if Wildcard stops updating it? True, in this particular instance there is that pesky "Early Access" tag but if we accept, as I believe we should, that any game that's started charging money is de facto "Live", then what we have here is nothing more than a game that has aged out to the point where it no longer justifies further development.

It seems to me that the issues are very different. There's a strong argument towards putting online games into a similar bracket as DVDs or books, where an initial purchase entitles you to indefinite use. The only substantive difference is that online games require someone else to host them for you and in that respect it may be that developers hold some moral responsibility to ensure continuity or provide a local alternative.

But no-one is suggesting that, when you buy a book, the author or publisher has an obligation to keep adding new chapters so you don't have read the same ones over and over. If games are going to be "preserved", either for current users or future generations, it's going to be in an as-is format, most likely based on a snapshot of the game at the time it ceased development. No-one, surely, is suggesting they also need to receive updates, complete with new content, deep into the future?

On that logic, there shouldn't be a problem with games entering "maintenance mode". Effectively, that is game preservation, isn't it? We ought to be delighted when we hear an MMORPG has gone into maintenance. It means the game has reached its final, finished, fixed state and can safely be archived for the pleasure of generations yet to come. 

And yet, for some reason, usually we're not. The mere hint that a game might be ceasing to add new content always indicates the end. It leads to an exodus of current players and an embargo on newcomers. No-one wants to play a dead game.

I don't know. I just feel there's some sort of logical inconsistency here, if not an outright paradox. Maybe someone can explain in the comments why Game Preservation is good but Maintenance Mode is bad. 

In the specific case of Atlas, when I read the speculation that development on the game might have ground to a permanent halt, I did actually find myself thinking, perversely, that now might be the time to go back and have another look. After all, if anything, it was the knowledge that Wildcard were likely to keep fiddling with the thing that put me off playing much in the first place. 

There's a lot to be said for the quiet life. In games, too.

Two Weeks In Another Country

It's been a whole month since the last What I've Been Listening To Lately. That's why I have nearly a hundred tracks bookmarked. I really need to make this a weekly feature. Or once a fortnight.

Oh, hey! Now there's a honking great 1970s-style AM pop radio DJ link if ever there was one. All I need to do is talk over the intro and we're set!

Fortnight - Taylor Swift

I guess there's no escaping it. As Stereogum put it, this is the track from the new album that she's personally selected to debut at #1 next week and who are we to argue with Taylor Swift? Luckily, I like it and I have plenty to say about it. 

First up, Post Malone. I don't get Post Malone, do you? For a long while I though it was the name of a band and I had that band pegged as some kind of variant on House of Pain or one of those New York/Boston "Irish" rock crews, none of which I can bring to mind right now 'cos I can't generally stand any of them. Then I noticed that in things I read it seemed sometimes like Post Malone was just one guy, not a band at all, and from context I thought maybe he could be some kind of rapper. 

Now I've seen him a few times, featured with other artists I like and I have even less of an idea what his deal is than I did before. Even watching this video now, I can't figure out exactly what he's doing.

Then there's the title. I wrote about this before, somewhere. I used to feel pretty safe assuming most Americans wouldn't use the word "fortnight" or likely even know what it meant. Now it seems to turn up in an American-language context all the time. I want to put that down to the success of Fortnite the video game but maybe that's post hoc. Fortnite fans, of course, want to get in on the act now Taylor's offered them a surely-unintentional (Or is it?) hook.

And finally, there's a very interesting, readable and thoughtful review by Tom Breihan, again at Stereogum, of the album this song comes from, which, in case you've been hiding under that lazy metaphor-rock everyone calls on to indicate a lack of cultural awareness, is called The Tortured Poets Department. Tom's thesis, if I may sloppily summarize it after one casual reading, is that Taylor Swift has stopped writing bangers in favor of wispy neo-folk confessionals, whose primary interest is their roman a clef puzzling, not their tunes. Also that she's fed up of being Taylor Swift for a living and would like everyone to get the hell out of her fucking business, especially where it concerns who she wants to see, date, go out with, or whatever euphemism you think appropriate for a single woman in her mid-thirties.

He states with some confidence that "Increasingly, Taylor Swift does not have casual fans", who he characterizes as people who just like the songs and don't even think about the identity of their subjects. I would like to out myself as a casual Taylor Swift fan. 

I have at least six of her albums on CD and I have literally no clue who any of the songs on any of them might be about. I do listen to the lyrics. Taylor's lyrics are one of the reasons I like her work in the first place. What I don't do is sit up half the night talking to people on the internet, trying to figure out who they might be about. 

I don't read most of the story-songs as autobiographical so much as meta-fictional and universal. I'm sure they are based in part on actual events in her life - most songwriters work primarily from personal experience. I just don't think it matters much who those specific experiences were with. 

It's like crime novels. I read quite a lot of those but I don't much care about the plots. I know a lot of people think that's the point but not for me, or not the main one, anyway. That would be the use of language first, followed by the characters and it's the same for song lyrics, particularly when the songs are also stories, which most of Taylor Swift's seem to be.

Anyway, that's probably enough about Taylor Swift, especially in a post where I didn't originally plan to mention her at all. We really aren't going to make much of an impact on those hundred or so tunes if we carry on like this, are we. (Don't bring "us" into it. Ed.)

Body Double - American Culture

It's like that, is it? We're doing it, are we? Big, honking, car-crash thematic segues? Okay then. Bring it on!

So. American Culture. Or American Culture if I may italicize the band name rather than the abstract concept. We had them last time. I must like them or something.

The weird thing about them is how they don't actually sound American at all. Last time I compared them to the Blue Aeroplanes, who come from just down the road from me. This one sounds like nothing so much as the Psychedelic Furs and it sounds like them a lot. 

Of course, the Psychedelic Furs were from the UK but once they stopped trying to sound like the Sex Pistols, they tried to sound as transantlantic as they possibly could, which ended up working very well for them, both artistically and commercially.

There seem to be an awful lot of bands called American Something. American Culture,  American Football, American Baseball... Okay, not that many, then. Still. 

Oh, wait! I have one more! American Cowboy. Oh, no... that's just the title of the song. It's actually by Guppy. The American Guppy, that is, not the Australian Guppy. They're a lot more New York No Wave, ironically.

American Guppy are good though. If that one had had a video we'd be watching it now. Or I would.

Fame Won't Love You - Sia (feat. Paris Hilton)

Okay, this is starting to spiral. Is it obvious yet I'm just overwhelmed by the sheer volume of choice I've afforded myself this time? It's not like I'm trying to be awkward, I promise.

It's just that I have this unfortunate thing where I still find Paris Hilton funny. Anyone else have that? Anyone? Bueller? Also, I find her weirdly endearing. Anyone ever have that? [Tumbleweed rolls by.].

Sia, I can take or leave. This track wouldn't be on here if it didn't have Paris Hilton in the credits. I'm not comfortable with that but I'm owning it for personal growth. 

Plus there's the irony. If you're missing that, here's the lyric video.

Something Blue - Bnny 

 

Where to begin? Bnny is my Big Discovery of the week. This is her (Their? Not sure if it's one person or a band. It's the Post Malone dilemma all over again. Or more like Blondie...) new single and the first thing I'd heard of hers. (Sticking with the singular for now.) Since then, I've listened to a lot more, going back a few years. Everything I heard was great. She's going on the Christmas list.

This particuler track has multiple resonances for me. The title is the same as one of my favorite novels, Something Blue by Ann Hood, which I like a lot more than Good Reads does. Ann Hood is hugely underrated. Go check her out. 

 

Then there's what it sounds like, which is Blondshell with the Nirvana influence turned up to 11.  

Which reminds me... 

 

Docket - Blondshell (feat. Bully)

 

It's no Veronica Mars but it's pretty good anyway. Hmm. We seem to have gone from A (American X) to B (Bnny, Blondshell, Bully.) I wonder if there's anything in this great stack o' tunes that begins with C...

Cigarette - Church Moms

There ya go! The title and the band. Double header. I hope no-one born after 2009 is listening to this or we're all going to be in trouble.

We're also going to be in trouble if I carry on with this alphabetic nonsense so let's put a stop to it right now.

 

Baby Bangs - Frances Forever (feat. dacelynn)

You wait the whole of recorded history for a song called Baby Bangs to come along and then two turn up on the same day. And they're both good, too!

This one had a visualiser and the other one didn't. Sorry, Snarls.

 

Superstar Shit - Dominic Fike

It might not be just Taylor who's missing some bangers. This post is feeling distinctly laid back, I can't help feeling. Also thematically all over the place. Not that a post where I share some songs I've been listening to lately has to have a theme other than that but I came in with several and haven't settled on any of them. Dominic Fike is the guy who covered Clairo's Bags for TripleJ, about which I said "I wouldn't call it a good cover but at least it's not boring." Apparently he has another voice he wasn't using at the time, which makes you wonder why he went with the one he did.

While we all think about that, here's one of those segments you get in annoying radio shows, where the DJ segues several songs together on the faulty logic of some perceived similarity that only exists in his mind or or her producer's, mostly so they can go off somewhere and have a smoke or a drink or one of those things they'll later hope never gets out because the culture is always in motion and what passed then may not pass later.

Starburster - Fontaines DC

I did my best to resist them for quite a while but Fontaines DC are just too good to ignore. And getting better all the time. I wonder whether they might be moving faster than their fans can follow but I guess that's their call. It's working for me, anyway.

Pop Star - Lime Garden

I suppose everything is just going to keep on sounding like something else until the end of time, now. I'm not convinced there are any new ways to combine the sounds we already have so unless someone finds some different ones...

There are 29 comments on YouTube as I write and between them they reference C86, the Strokes, Stereolab and the Hearthrobs. One commenter even quotes the band's Wikipedia entry, for which, a) props to Lime Garden for having one and b) really? 

My favorite comment calls them "the sound of the je nais se quois of the zeitgeist". And people have the nerve to say they don't read the comments on YouTube like that makes them better than the rest of us.

One of the themes I was toying with for this post was Songs I've Only Just Discovered That Turn Out To Have Tens Of Millions Of Views On YouTube. It's been happening a lot lately. I might still stack a whole bunch but for now let's just have a couple as we wind up for the close. It might be nice to go out with something someone could have heard - or at least heard of. (Although to be fair we did start with Taylor Swift...)

Mover Awayer - Hobo Johnson

5.6m views. He was quite the thing for a while, apparently. I never heard of him until a couple of weeks ago. He's like someone crossed Buck 65 with Jonathan Richman. I watched a few of his videos and they were all pretty good. In fact, I think we ought to have another because the lyrics on this next one are something else. Especially from someone who looks like he's still in high school.

I Want A Dog - Hobo Johnson

"I want my dog to fucking talk
And not only just to me" 

You and me both, Hobo. You don't mind if I call you Hobo, do you? I feel like we have a connection.

Lovers Who Uncover - Crystal Castles 

The video has 340k views but the song on its own has 4.5m. It's a cover. The original by the Little Ones is better in my opinion but it "only" has 427k views. Either way, it's plenty.

Plenty more where those came from but for now I think I'm going to call it with something brand new by someone who isn't. I have a whole slew of those, too. I was going to do a special and name it something like Old Duffers Who Think They're Still All That (And Maybe They're Right). Might be a little too close to home though.

Space Oddyssey 2001 - Kate Nash

Not that I'm calling Kate Nash old. Or a duffer. I wouldn't dare. She can wrestle.

I was going to stop there but it would have made an even number that doesn't end in zero. I don't like those. Well, twelve is acceptable, being a dozen, but the rest? I don't think so. One more for a comfortable fifteen (Ends in five, so the best.)

New Order - Mass Of Fermenting Dregs

That's New Order by Mass Of Fermenting Dregs, not Mass Of Fermenting Dregs by New Order, just to make it clear. You know those competitions they have at village fetes for Dog That Looks Most Like Its Owner? I'm thinking of doing a post along the lines of Bands That Sound Least Like Their Name. This lot are off to a flyer!

Well, that was all over the place. And it barely made a dent in the pile. I'm going to have to sort myself out for next time, which is going to have to be pretty damn soon. You can take that as a promise or a threat.

I know which I'd go for.

So, When Is Superman Day, Exactly?

Did you know yesterday was Superman Day? I didn't and Bree at MassivelyOP didn't remember the date either. It turns out there's a good reason why we might have been confused. There's more than one Superman Day.

Bree was reporting on what she'd read in a press release from Daybreak Games' subdivision Dimensional Ink, which confidently begins "April 18th marks the official celebration of Superman Day across the web, the world, and the DC Universe." And that's the truth. Or one of them.

The DC establishment backs April 18. James Gunn is Mr. DC for the moment and he certainly thinks April 18 is Superman Day. So does Elizabeth Tulloch aka Lois Lane from Superman and Lois, the show now set to mark the swansong in the long-running and fitfully fruitful relationship between the CW and DC Comics.  

April 18 has apparently been "Superman Day" in some realities since 2004. The date was chosen because it marks the anniversary of the first appearance of the Man of Steel in Action Comics #1 back in 1938. 

If you google "When is Superman Day?", though, Days of the Year, supported by many other calendar websites, offers June 12, citing an official announcement to that effect by DC Comics in 2013. There's clearly some confusion going on, which may or may not derive from the sheer number of possible anniversaries available: Superman's birthday, Clark Kent's birthday, the arrival of Kal El on Earth and the first appearance of a comic featuring the Man of Tomorrow.

According to one of the sources linked above, there's a lore explanation for choosing April 18: it's the date Superman gave as his birthday in an interview with Lois Lane and the date he uses for official purposes. Unfortunately, whoever made that claim neglected to provide details of where and when the interview took place and I haven't been able to verify it. (Okay, I haven't tried to verify it. I have other things to do, you know...)

The same source, which I am not convinced is reliable, asserts that in his alter ego of Clark Kent, Superman claims June 18 as his birthday. Most other sources suggest what I seem to remember from my own comics-reading days, when Superman's birthday was usually given as February 29. 

A possible clean-up for all this comes from the unlikely source of Sky History, whose This Day in History column explains - while citing June 17 as Clark Kent's birthday - that in the 1950s Superman cut his cake and blew out his candles (Carefully, one hopes...) in October, before shifting the celebrations to Leap Year Day in the 1960s, where it remained for a couple of decades before moving to June. Just to be awkward they also throw December into the mix with no supporting evidence at all.

At this point it has probably become clear to us all that no-one knows when Superman's birthday is, nor when or most likely even what "Superman Day" is supposed to be. This is why Dr. Egon Spengler was so insistent the streams should not be crossed.

What I do know is that DCUO is celebrating its own version of Superman Day from now until... actually, I'm not clear on when it stops but it carries on into next week at least, because that's when they're giving way some free posters. 

I'll be there for that. DCUO gives good poster. I'll have somewhere to put them, too, because thanks to the games obtuse and confusing UI and patent lack of clarity I now have two entire bases to decorate. Or, in one case, re-decorate.

How did that happen? Well, I'll tell you. Only I'm going to keep this extremely short for once. I feel I've written more than enough two-thousand word essays on my own incompetence for anyone to want to read another. I certainly don't want to write one.

The key points are these: I logged into the game to spend 2000 DBC on the new prestige lair, Superman's Fortress of Solitude, for some reason now renamed the Sunstone Fortress. I have cash shop money to burn so even though the real-world equivalent is allegedly $20, it cost me what I consider to be nothing.

I bought it with no problems and added it to my Base collection but then I spent the best part of an hour, including much googling and watching YouTube videos, trying to figure out how to set the damn thing as my second base. You can have up to eight of them, allegedly, but I just could not figure out how to get more than the one I already had.

In the process I managed to completely strip all the furnishings from my old base, move it across town and replace it with the Fortress and still end up with only the one lair. In the end I figured it out (You have to buy a Deed from the cash store AS WELL as the Fortress, which is technically just a visual skin, not an additional property. Also the Deed is really hard to spot due to the way the menus work and the dumb color scheme they've gone with. It took me three passes to find it and I only spotted it then after I'd watched someone do it in a video...)

After an hour and a half, during which I even got half-way through submitting a Customer Service ticket before I decided I was going to make myself look utterly ridiculous by doing it, I finally got everything sorted to the point where I now have two bases, one of which is my new Sunstone Fortress and the other my old Gothic Lair.

They are both completely empty, of course. All my furniture - and I have a lot, almost all freebies - is in storage. It's going to take me several solid sessions to get both lairs as I want them but if I'm honest, the first one was a mess. It really needed a makeover and now it's going to get one.

Decorating in DCUO is fun so it's more of a treat than a trial. And Krypto's going to love his new home, I'm sure. 

When I'm all settled in I'll probably do another post about that but for now, enjoy the sense of space in all those outdoor shots. That view is what I really bought the place for...

Spring Is Here, The Flowers Is Riz

New World has always looked gorgeous, even at lower fidelity, but with the much more powerful video card I bought last summer now able to run it at the higher settings, it's more stunning than ever. That was readily apparent the moment I logged in after a 13GB patch today to take a look at the Springtime Bloom event that just began.

The game generally does holidays well, with events that are accessible, entertaining and visually spectacular, although if there's a "but..." it's that they do tend to stick to a formula. I missed the first Springtime Bloom last year but the current one still felt very familiar, being formally almost identical to the Winter Convergence festival, which I've visited a couple of times.   

Spring lends itself particularly well to the process, though, what with the focus on floral displays. The holiday is celebrated in the central cities of four of Aeternum's regions - Everfall, Monarch's Bluff, Weaver's Fen and Brightwood - or at least those are the ones that hand out gifts. I'm not sure if the rest also put up decorations and if not, why not.

There are also four Springtime Villages, one in each of the aforementioned areas, which is where you can pick up the event questline, spend your event tokens in the event shop and craft your event quest items on the event crafting tables. It's quite the event!

Each of the eight locations has a free package of holiday goods you can pick up once a day or thereabouts and they all have portals attached so in theory you could log in and zap yourself around the lot in a matter of minutes. I'll be doing that from now on but for this first rotation I had to do a fair bit of travelling to open up the portals I didn't already have, which meant it took me about an hour altogether.

I did also do a couple of the faction events on the way. They involve picking some highly suspicious flowers, which sounds simple enough until you find out every time you go near one a bunch of giant wasps appear and chase you about.

That in itself wouldn't be so bad if you could swat them but these are super-annoying event wasps, almost entirely immune to damage from anything other than event bombs. To kill them you have to lay down traps and lead the wasps into them, whereupon the traps explode, damaging but - annoyingly - not outright killing the wasps. 

It took me about four or five traps each time to finish them all off and I was under half health by the time the last one pegged out so it's not a forgone conclusion you'll survive. Game developers seem to love mechanics like this. I'm forever having to lay traps or lead mobs into objects to kill them because somehow they're magically invulnerable to all other kinds of harm. 

I have to wonder if there's anyone playing who genuinely prefers these kinds of dances to just whacking the damn things with a sword or an axe. Sometimes it gets to feel like there's no point even carting a weapon around, you get so little use out of it. And holiday events seem particularly prone to such shenanigans.

One thing about the plant-picking I did appreciate was the gigantic aerial signpost. Over each field hangs a huge rainbow ring you really can't miss. I didn't even know what it was when I saw it but it was so spectacular I headed over to investigate. That's how you bring people to the party.

As is the way of New World, there are plentiful rewards in the way of consumables along the way but the good stuff is gated both by event currency and event faction. Fortunately, both come fairly readily. I'm glad of that because there's some very nice stuff in the event store. Lots of outfits and some very nice furniture.

While I definitely would like the over-the-top four poster bed and the chaise-longue, as well as several of the flower baskets, I have already claimed a prodigious amount of free furniture from Prime Gaming giveaways and I'm struggling to find anywhere to put it all. I went to my house last time I played, which was only a few days ago, and was a bit surprised by how cramped it felt. 

It's not like I bought the smallest one although I didn't buy the biggest either. Still, you'd think a three-story townhouse with a porch and balcony would be easier to furnish than that. 

Gold is a lot easier to come by in New World than it was, rental costs were slashed to a fraction of what they used to be and I believe you can own more than one house. I might have to look into buying a second home, just to have somewhere to put all my free stuff.

I have no plans to return to New World full-time nor even part-time but it always was and still remains a very good MMORPG. I'll at least be sticking around for the rest of the spring holiday, even if all that amounts to is a quick flip around the festival sites every day or two. 

And who knows what I might get caught up in while I'm there? A lot has certainly happened since the last time I played for any length of time, not least a whole, new expansion. I don't think I'll be buying that but I admit I'm tempted when I see someone cruise past me on the back of a lion, while I have to keep trudging along on foot.

Before I finish, I'll just give a quick thank-you to Heartless Gamer for pointing out the recent change from Alt-H to F10 when you want to hide the UI. F10 has been my go-to for that since EverQuest and muscle memory frequently has me pressing it in games where it's not relevant. I used it a lot today and it felt good.

It's amazing how the little things cheer you up sometimes, isn't it? Not that I wasn't cheery enough to begin with but it's nice to have one less niggle to worry about. It all adds up or counts down, whichever way you prefer to look at it.

Don't Ask Me What's Real. I'll Only Tell You "Everything".

Exactly a month ago I said I wasn't going to be "dabbling with audio and video" any more," unless and until there are some very major advances. Why? Because "It takes ages and I get nothing interesting out of it." 

That remains true for AI-generated video, which still seems a long way from becoming a consumer product. I keep a weather eye on it in case anything worth mentioning develops but so far it's mostly more of the same five second pans and uncanny-valley animation, with tiny, incremental adjustments only the initiated will notice.

AI audio - specifically music - is another matter entirely. Seemingly overnight, a cluster of apps have surfaced, each capable of generating segments of songs that seem barely distinguishable from what, for shorthand purposes only, I'll call the real thing. The first one I ran into was Suno, which I wrote about briefly just over a week ago. 

The AI aggregator There's An AI For That claims to be able to point you to more than a hundred alternatives to Suno but the one that's really getting all the attention is Udio. I watched a couple of YouTube videos about Udio and it looked more than interesting enough to justify some "dabbling". 

Udio is currently in Open Beta. While that lasts you're free to create an astonishingly generous 1200 songs a month. All you have to give them is an email address. The ownership rules on what you make are pretty lenient too, although like all such services they do ask you to credit them, while also retaining the right to do it for you if they feel like it.

At first I just played around with the default text-to-song prompt. That gets you two thirty-second  clips, like the one below, for which I specified some downtempo electronica about an old horse looking back at his life.

The results were pretty good, although no better to my ear than the ones I got from Suno. Once again, the weak point was the AI-generated lyrics. And the titles, which most confusingly change every time you edit or extend a song. AIs still really aren't great at writing anything you'd want to read for pleasure.

What I really wanted to do was upload my own lyrics and have the AI set them to music for me. Both Suno and Udio can do that but the free version of Suno is quite strict in what it allows you to do with anything you create using the service. Udio, at least while it's in beta, is much less restrictive.

With that in mind, I started playing around with Udio to see if I could get it to show me what one of my songs might have sounded like, had I ever managed to get a band to play it the way I wanted it played, something I only rarely and fleetingly achieved because musicians, even incompetent ones, annoyingly have ideas of their own. 

I can't help but be struck by the similarities with the way I used to have to find a group before I could complete certain content in EverQuest. That all changed with the addition of Mercenaries, after which I pretty much never needed to speak to another human being in the game again. AI might just be my musical mercenary solution...

The first problem I ran into was one of duration. Not the thirty-second limit on segments but the way the AI simply speeds the song up to get all the words in. If you give it half a dozen lines it sounds fine. If you give it two verses it starts sounding like The Dickies.

The answer to that is to break the thing up into sections of suitable size and stitch them together, something that's very easy to do using the simple and intuitive interface. If you get muddled, there's a very helpful FAQ. 

It took me about half an hour to complete my song, which clocked in at 2.44. Just about the perfect length.

It's made up of an intro, two verses, a chorus, a third verse, a second chorus and a coda. That's how I originally wrote it except for the intro, which someone else would no doubt have tacked onto the front whether I liked it or not, had I allowed a bunch of actual musicians to get their hands on it. Along with a solo and some kind of break, no doubt, because musicians always try to complicate things.

When it was done, by far the most surprising thing about it was that the vocal melody, paricularly in the verses, sounds uncannily similar to the one I actually wrote back in the mid-1980s. Eerily so, in fact. If I had one of my old cassettes, I'd upload a version I recorded back then, for comparison. Sadly, even if I was able to find one, I fear all you'd hear after thirty-five years is tape hiss.

The chorus didn't sound much like the one I wrote. More worryingly , the second chorus didn't sound much like the first. It may be that there's a way to cut and paste sections so they're identical but if so I haven't worked out how to do it. I just told the AI to do it again and it did, but differently.

The effect of having the same lines sung in two different ways works quite well, although if it's not the same each time I don't think it actually qualifies as a chorus. There's also an odd moment when the singer appears to improvise a couple of words I didn't give her, one when she rushes the begining of a verse and another when she slurs a word. Oddly, all of those seem to add to the faux veracity of the thing.

Not quite as charmingly quirky are the moments when the segments grind a little against each other before they settle in. All told, though, I have to say it's a better job than most line-ups of any band I ever played in would have been able to come up with. It may not be professional standard but it would definitely have gotten us through any audition needed to play the back room of a pub back in 1985.

Once I was passably content with the music I thought about adding some visuals. I was planning on uploading it to my YouTube channel so I could link to it here and it's nice to have something to watch while you're half-listening, I always find.

My immediate thought was to have another AI make me a video based on the audio file but on investigation that turned out to be way more trouble than I was prepared to take. I've futzed around with that sort of thing before and it always seems to be me doing most of the work. 

As far as I can tell, while the actual output of AI-generated video keeps getting more and more sophisticated, the amount of technical expertise and sheer effort to produce anything longer than three seconds is constantly accelerating too. I was pretty sure it would be quicker to knock something up myself from some old camcorder footage I had lying around so that's what I did.

Actually, it wasn't that much quicker because once I got started I couldn't stop fiddling about with it. I had it done in about an hour and then I thought it would look better with the lyrics and that took an hour more. In the end I got something a not very imaginative twelve year old would probably be mildly embarassed to hand in for media studies homework. Good enough!

The thing to remember here is that I'm very easily pleased. I can hear and see most of what's wrong with what I've made but I still think it's pretty good anyway. I've already watched it half a dozen times and there's every chance I'll watch it half a dozen more.

In fact, the only thing likely to get me to stop is making another one with another of my old songs. I'm very curious to see whether the shape of the lyric, coupled with the intended style, does indeed force the whole thing into a certain melodic pigeonhole. Did I only imagine I was creating those tunes all those years ago, when really they were inherent in the words I was writing and the subculture I inhabited?

I'm aware that we stand on the very edge of musical annihilation here and that in a matter of years or possibly months it may be literally impossible to know if anything we hear contains any human emotion or experience at all. And yet, I'm not unduly concerned. Against such worries I set my faith in the ability of all true creative souls to turn every technical innovation into a means of self-expression.

I'm old enough to remember when album sleeves sometimes bore the passive-aggressive rubric "No Synthesizers". The line between authenticity and artificialty is constantly being re-drawn.

This video I made for a song on which I played none of the instruments and didn't sing a note has words I wrote and images I shot. It sounds remarkably reminiscent of the demo I recorded more than a quarter of a century ago in a rented room with a friend with a guitar and an acquaintance with a drum kit. Only better. 

What's more, I can feel the new pushing out the old. I can already feel the AI singer's phrasing replacing the way I always heard it in my head.

Don't ask me what's real. I'll only tell you "Everything".

You're Not From Around Here, Are You?

After I hit Publish on last month's post about not being able to watch the third and fourth seasons of Roswell New Mexico, I did what I said I might do and re-upped to my VPN of choice, which happens to be Mullvad. It's very cheap, has no registration process to speak of and happily supports ad hoc comings and goings with no need for any kind of subscription. 

Also, it has a cute logo of a mole wearing a hard hat. Not that I'm saying that influenced me in any way.

The only drawback is that Mullvad doesn't support Windows operating systems older than Win10, as I found out when I went to use it on my laptop, which stills chugs along on Windows 8.1, partly because I had the disk but mostly because it's too ancient to run anything newer. Luckily, Mullvad supplies its own work-around, which just requires some cutting and pasting so it can piggyback on a third-party service, the  name of which I forget and which I'm too lazy to look up.

Have we been here before? I feel like I'm getting deja vu.

Doesn't matter. The point isn't to discuss the nit-picking details of how I'm passing myself off as a New Yorker these days. It's to say that, as I suspected, no amount of digital camoflage was ever going to let me watch those two missing seasons, which I still haven't seen, for the simple reason that no-one is streaming them for free anywhere.

They are for sale as digital downloads and, courtesy of my spoofed IP address, I could theoretically buy them from Amazon and a few other places but I'm neither ready to pay that price yet nor certain how it would go with my UK payment credentials if I tried. It might come to it eventually but for the while I'm holding off to see if the show returns to a streaming service I can access, one way or another.

Since I'd paid for a month anyway, I thought I'd see what else was available that previously hadn't been, when I was geo-locked to my genuine physical location. The first show I thought of was...

Housebroken (Season 2)

Housebroken, for those who neither know nor likely care, is an American animated sitcom made for an adult audience, featuring a poodle called Holly, who runs therapy sessions for animals in her neighborhood out of the front room of her owner's home, while she's out at work. Holly is voiced by Lisa Kudrow, who you will certainly know from shows like Friends and... well, just Friends, really, although god knows no-one needs another show on their resume if they have that one.

I really enjoyed the first season of Housebroken. There are only two but a third has been commissioned so it must be doing okay, even though it has no more than a mediocre 6.4 on IMDB. I'd give it something closer to an 8, I think. The best episodes are very funny but it does lack a little in consistency. 

The second season is noticeably more cartoonish than the first in that it makes more extensive use of the freedom of animation to stretch the boundaries of a supposedly realistic setting (If you can call anything where cats, dogs, hamsters and pigs sit peacably in a room together without tearing each other apart "realistic". Oh, and they talk and some of them run businesses and... you know what, forget I ever used the word...)

There are also several of those set-piece episodes where characters meet versions of themselves in dreams or perform musical numbers in the style of a broadway show or parody other shows and movies. Sometimes all of those at once. Also, there are a surprising number of scenes - even whole episodes - where one or more of the animals is on drugs. 

At times I thought it seemed a bit much for one season - especially the second. You don't usually get too much of this sort of thing until later in the run, when the writers are either running out of ideas or the show is so popular they feel they can get away with anything. 

That's not to complain, though. Mostly, the more surreal it gets, the funnier it is. I particularly enjoyed the episode with the Thelma and Louise parody. And there's really not much point making an animated comedy about talking animals if you don't lean into the possibilities. 

The voice acting is uniformly good. There's a plethora of famous guest voices but none of them unsettle or unbalance the gestalt of the regular ensemble. The writing is sharp enough, although the comedy can also be also very broad. It's a difficult trick to match those two approaches. Mostly it comes off but  even when it doesn't, things generally move fast enough you're past it before you notice.

The animation is fine. Better than functional, not spectacular, always in the very recognizeable, American made-for-TV style. It sits well in that tradition, not surprising when you find the studio behind it is Bento Box Entertainment, best known for Bob's Burgers, a show I have never watched but which, from the title alone, sounds like it must be the most American show ever. 

It is mildly ironic that such a US-oriented studio should name itself after an iconic Japanese artefact. I'm sure there's a story in that, which leads me neatly, if unexpectedly, on to...

Toradora

Toradora,  as I'm sure someone reading this already knows, is an anime in which male lead Ryuji's ability to put together a perfect Bento Box features heavily. I wasn't going to talk about that show today. I had other ideas but when the universe gives you that kind of nudge it'd be crazy to ignore it.

Not just the anime but the whole IP is a big deal in Japan. It began as a series of light novels, a concept I wasn't familiar with a year ago but now know quite well from work, where we seem to be selling more and more of them. 

We don't currently stock English translations of this particular series. They do exist but they don't seem to be in print at the moment. If they were, I'd order the first in the run to see if it matches up to the anime, which is one of the best I've seen. 

Of course, my minimal exposure to the form makes that a judgment of limited value but don't take my word for how good it is. Here's another opinion. Or just google the reviews. They're uniformly excellent. 

It's widely considered a classic in the high school romance/coming of age genre but it's considerably more nuanced, thoughtful and just downright odd than that pigeonhole would suggest. The cast isn't huge - there are two central characters and something like half a dozen close supporting roles - but everyone, even the minor, recurring characters, gives a strong impression of depth and solidity. 

The narrative throughline, which meanders chronologically through the school year for the full twenty-five episodes, somehow manages to be at once coherent and sprawling. The show opens with a fairly defined concept: Ryuji and Taiga both have ferocious reputations and/or appearances that make their classmates fear and/or respect them. Naturally, over the course of the series, it will be revealed that they are nothing like as scary as everyone thinks and of course they will be revealed to be made for each other.

Yeah. Right. Good luck with that! It's true we get there in the end but as with all the best trips, it's the journey that counts, not the destination. Pretty much every cliche is overturned. Every plot twist you see coming goes somewhere else. Every major character has their own journey to take and all of them end up being more complex than you'd imagined.

I never knew from one episode to the next what to expect but I found the whole thing so emotionally involving I literally pumped my fist in the air and yelled "Yes!" at one crucial moment and threw both my arms in the air with a despairing "FFS!" at another. This is unseemly behavior for anyone but especially someone about to hit retirement age. 

I watched it with the English (American.) dub and I rate the voice acting very highly. I've long been an advocate of V.O. with subtitles but in the case of anime I think I'm definitely leaning towards the dubbed versions. Or maybe I've just been lucky so far.

It's fair to say this is my kind of show but I would recommend it to anyone. It's heartwarming in the best way but also thought-provoking and challenging. The ending, which remains controversial, takes some getting your head around, I'll tell you that for nothing. I was all "Wait! What?" until I had a good long think about it but I'm cool with it now.... I think...

In keeping with my comments from the last time I wrote about stuff like this, I'll be getting Toradora on DVD. Anything you want to watch again needs to be on hard copy now, as I think we can all agree. Which brings me neatly back to where I was going before, and ...

The Conners  (Season One)

Thanks to my VPN I am finally watching the Roseanne follow-up that began all the way back in 2018. Really? Was it that long ago?

I wanted to watch this from the moment I heard of it. Roseanne was one of those shows from the '90s that benchmark the decade (Even though it actually started airing in the very late 'eighties.) Roseanne, Friends, Frasier - whatever ran in the 10PM Friday slot on Channel 4. It's weird to think it now but in the UK, at the time, those and more like them were considered niche viewing only suitable for the minority channel, at least at first.

Of all of them, the only one I have never re-watched is Roseanne but my memories of it, more than a quarter of a century old, remain surrisingly clear. It must have made an impression. The final season, which aired in 1997, I have pegged in my mind as The End Of TV, mostly because it came just two years before I started playing EverQuest and gave up watching TV for a decade and a half. Not because it was... not great, to put it politely.

Apart from that last season, though, I loved Roseanne. Not Roseanne the character, or Roseanne Barr the actor, both of whom I always found annoying, but the rest of the cast. (Okay, not Martin Mull either. He was even more annoying than Roseanne...) so I was naturally interested when I heard the show was getting a sequel. 

That happened in 2018 and everything was apparently going jut fine until Roseanne torpedoed her own show with an exceptionally ill-advised Twitter rant. That looked to be it for the revival until she magnanimously opted out of the show she'd created under her own name, leaving the rest of the cast to carry on under the family banner. When I learned that it would be coming back without the titular character my interest actually increased.

And then I somehow never managed to watch it. I mean I could have. I think it came out here on Sky originally. It's now on Sky Go, whatever that is. Also Apple TV for some reason. It just hasn't appeared on any of the channels or services I'm registered with or subscribed to or can get for free so I kind of forgot all about it.

The Conners is, however, on Netflix in the USA and now, thanks to my VPN disguise, it just shows up on my Netflix account as if it was always there. Which is weird. You'd think there'd be some code to stop that.

I'm very glad there isn't because I'm really enjoying The Conners. It's stagey and occasionally awkward but it's all the characters I remember, behaving like they should. Everyone looks suitably older and more shop-worn although I'd have to re-watch the original series to judge just how far to the left the politics has shifted. It feels like it must be a long way, especially since it seems that in the one, short revival season made before she dropped out, Roseanne was written as a Trump supporter.

John Goodman, Sara Gilbert and Laurie Metcalfe are all as good in their familiar, familial roles as you could hope and Lecey Goransen is better as Becky than I remember, although maybe I'm thinking of Sarah Chalke, the other Becky. There were famously two Beckys...

As an actor, I don't think Laurie Metcalfe has a setting below "Over the Top" but she's counterweighted by Sara Gilbert, playing Darlene with perfect, dry understatement as always. Amusingly, Michael Fishman's DJ is as bland and underwritten as an adult as he was as a child, to the point where it has to be an in-joke.

Of the new characters, I really like Ames McNamara as Mark, the cross-dressing, gay middle-schooler. Child actors can be awkward but he seems astonishingly natural in what must be a very challenging role. His elder sister, Harris, played by Emma Kenney, is winningly reminiscent of her mother, Darlene, at the same age, while somehow looking, sounding and acting completely different. That's a hell of a trick.

The rest of the newbies I'm still getting used to but I'm only in Season One. The show has a very poor rating on most of the review sites I've checked, some of which might relate to residual loyalty to Roseanne Barr or to the show's unexpectedly liberal political stance. I broadly approve of the politics on show but even I was surprised by just how "woke" Darlene has grown up to be. I remember her as more of a Daria-inspired nihilist than any kind of social justice warrior.

I'll have to go back and re-watch Roseanne to see if I'm mis-remembering that. I guess I could faff about, trying to find out if and where it's streaming and whether I can access it but I just checked and you can get the box set of the whole nine seasons for under £35 on Amazon so I think I'll just save myself the hassle and buy it.

Of course, then it'll just sit around on a shelf, unopened, like all the other box sets in this house but at least I'll have the comfort and security of knowing I could watch it, if I wanted to. 

That's got to be worth the money all on its own.

We'll Grow Sweet Ipomea...

I was a little startled to see this news report from MassivelyOP, when it popped up in my feed this evening. It's all about "a selection of officially licensed GW2 flower seeds based on some of the plants found within Tyria". The MOP piece doesn't specifically say they're for sale but that's the impression I got and it made me think.

I have a garden. I don't like gardening but I have one anyway. It came with the house. It's not small, either. 

When we first moved in, thirty years ago, we used it a lot. Then the kids left home and we mostly forgot about it for a while. When we remembered it was there it took me several years to hack it back into a manageable state. 

It's not at all bad now although it's fortunate fashion has moved on from the manicured perfection of the aughts to a looser, wildlife-friendly feel. Our massive pile of brushwood isn't evidence of neglect any more - it's a hedgehog sanctuary. To prove it we have actual hedgehogs. I've seen them.

I grew up in a home where gardening was a serious enterprise. We had two very large vegetable gardens, an orchard, a couple of lawns and plenty of decorative flowerbeds and shrubs. My main interest in gardening as a child was avoiding it.

About all I'm prepared to do now is trim the hedges, tidy the paths and keep the grass short but I did go so far as to scatter some wildflower seeds a while back. I even watered them occasionally. They grew quite nicely and weren't any trouble so I thought I might get some of these amusing GW2 seeds and have a go with those. It would amuse Mrs. Bhagpuss, at least.

There's a link in the piece so I clicked on that. If I was startled by the news item, I was floored by the website itself. 

For a start, it's so glaring and harsh. Neon on a field of black. It reminds me of a GeoCities home page from the 'nineties. What really set me back, though, was the means through which the various seeds can be acquired.

They aren't for sale after all. They're free but only to selected applicants and when I say "selected" I'm being quite literal. For a chance at the "rare" seeds you need to "Tell us (in a few sentences) why you think you should be sent a rare seed pack and we'll contact you if you've been selected"

I did briefly consider it. I was going to cite my decade playing the game and the hundreds of thousands of words I've written about it. Then I thought I wouldn't after all. There's free and there's free. I'd have happily paid a small sum plus postage for the flax and the passiflora but I'm not writing a begging letter or taking an exam.

It did pique my interest, though, so I did a little digging through the rest of the site to see what the deal was. The affair is backed by The Agency for Nature, an organization comprising creative teams from five UK advertising agencies, each of which is leading a project intended, according to a report in industry journal Creative Review, to get people to "go out and spend more time in nature".

The team behind the GW2 seed packets comes from Wieden+Kennedy, where Aleks Atanasovski and Hannah Young are apparently only "beginning with Guild Wars 2". Since gathering seems to be a part of most games these days, I imagine they'll be spoilt for choice on which MMORPG to tap for inspiration next. 

Behind all of this sit "two non profits - Purpose Disruptors and Glimpse". Purpose Disruptors is on a mission "to catalyse the advertising industry’s climate transition to align with the IPCC’s 1.5 degree global warming target". 

Glimpse is - or perhaps was - "a new collective for creative people who want to use their skills for good." New eight years ago, that is. Its founder, James Turner, posted a valedictory letter last month in which, among other things, he said "I don’t plan on using the Glimpse name or brand in the future."

Whatever the current status of any or all of these, what's unequivocally clear is that all of them work in advertising or closely-related trades. I worked in marketing for a couple of years back in the 'eighties and I had quite a few friends and contacts in advertising. It would be tempting to say the business must have changed a lot since then but honestly, there was plenty of earnestness on display even back in the age of Greed is Good. I don't find it as surprising as all that.

Neither do I find the queasy garishness of the website particularly out of keeping with the profession. We sell graphic design books and journals where I work and if you want to see some really jarring, abrasive visuals, those are always a good place to start.

Anyway, that's how I've been spending my evening. It's dark so I can't do much gardening anyway. That's my excuse. (I have a million excuses for not doing the gardening. This year, nine hundred and ninety nine thousand of them involve rain.)

If you fancy growing some Tyrian flowers and you live in the UK, which is as far as Seed Saga is prepared to send them, I suggest you get started on your essay right away. 

Good luck. I'm sure the competition will be fierce.