"Players Can Now Rename Their Pet Beds..."

It's been three weeks since I last played Nightingale. Back then, I was still enjoying the ambience and there were things left I could have done but it was all starting to get a bit what's the point?" 

I'd reached the end of the narrative, seen all the main biomes as well as most of their variations, and while there were still plenty of upgrades I could have made to all my gear, the stuff I had was already more than equal to anything I was likely to ask of it. Everything left to do seemed like it would become incrementally less engaging the longer I carried on with it, so I stopped.

This has to be a major problem for all live service games, doesn't it? Holding players' atttention once they've burned through the initial tranche of content. The people making the games certainly seem to think so, even if their bosses don't.

Games with a built-in competetive component have a clear edge. Players don't need much in the way of incentive to keep logging in if their place on a league table depends on it. Moreover, races and fights and matches all benefit from keeping to the same ruleset over time. No need to keep adding new twists and tweaks. Or not so much, at least.

Sandboxes also have a slight advantage in that players generally take longer to fall out of love with their own creativity than with someone else's. Give them the tools and they'll likely not only finish the job but tear it down and start over a few times before they finally lose interest.

If gameplay depends on exploration, storyline or character progression, though, it's going to need constant refreshment to keep people interested. MMORPGs have traditionally managed that through multiple channels, including but not limited to slowing progress to a crawl, dangling the tastiest temptations far out of reach, encouraging tribal loyalties, instilling a sense of duty or responsibilty and of course pumping out half-finished, poorly-tested content as fast as they can shove it down the pipe.

The genre has also relied heavily on a "throw it at the wall and see what sticks" approach to content. By trying to appeal to anyone, from the cuddliest of Socialisers to the most psychopathic of Killers, along with absolutely everyone inbetween, many MMORPGs may have suffered terribly from lack of focus or feature creep but they've also sometimes succeeeded in creating a church broad enough for anyone to worship at, so long as they don't mind kneeling next to heretics and heathens.

As time goes on and the sheer number of MMORPGS, both long-running and nearly-new, continues to grow, these tricks don't seem to be working as well as they once did. Still, it does seem as though they're having more effect than later innovations such as short-lived, cyclical Seasons, a gimmick whose appeal may already be almost at an end, whereas the arrival of an "expansion" can still bring people flocking back to games they once played.

Even a big Update can show up as a significant bump on the Steam charts. I was expecting one of those for Nightingale, which released its first major update yesterday. Known uninspiringly as 0.2 (Seriously, give these things names if you want people to pay attention to them, guys!), it's a fairly hefty package, including some much-requested quality of life improvements and a deal of new content.

The full patch notes (Known somewhat pretentiously to Inflexion as "the Changelog".) are extensive. There's even a video. Here are some of the highlights, along with my comments because I can't possibly keep my opinions to myself, even when I haven't yet had time to see most of this stuff in action:

You can now queue up to six items at a crafting station. Previously you had to complete each one before starting the next, which led to me not tearing down the old ones when I built upgrades, just so I could have more things cooking at the same time. If nothing else, this might save me some space.

Craft stations now pull from storage, which is a huge improvement. I did quite like trotting in and out of different rooms, opening chest after chest in search of a hinge or some coal, but it was kind of a zen thing at best. Crafting is going to be a lot more practical now, not to mention faster. That said, the range from which the stations will pull is quite short. I'm going to have to build a whole new storage area directly above my workroom for everything to be available immediately.

Three new weapons have been added - Sheath of Throwing Knives, Satchel of Grenades and Blunderbuss. Clearly, the intention is to improve ranged attacks, which were very limited and basic. They've also zhuzhed up the existing one-handed weapons, sickle, knife and hammer, so as to allow for dual-weapon builds.

As well as new weapons, we have new mobs trying to kill us. Only a couple but they do look quite distinctive, plus they have new attacks. Some of the existing mobs have also learned new tricks. We'll all need to be on our toes until we get the hang of the new combat techniques. I haven't had the chance to try them out yet but I look forward to being bombed from above and zapped at a distance as I fire my blunderbuss and fling my knives. Once I've made them, that is.

To that end, there are some new quests revolving around gaining the blueprints for the new weapons and learning to use them. The update also cleans up some loose ends on existing quests and allows for more options for players who may have thought they'd locked themselves out of certain choices. Almost the first thing I did when I logged in last night was to go back to speak to someone so I could get an annoying dangling questline out of my journal.

Traders now trade remotely. Or at least they do once you've been to see them at their locations at leaast once. This is a major improvement in utility for the game, not least because some bright spark at Inflexion thought it would be a spiffy idea to distribute all the games hundreds of buyable items and blueprints across dozens of vendors situated in dozens of different realms, each of whom requires you not only to navigate the entire map to find them but to build a damn portal to get there in the first place. 

It made for excellent content - once. Having to keep doing it every time I needed to go back to buy something I either couldn't afford the first time or thought I'd never need but later found I couldn't do without wasn't quite so much fun, so I was very excited to see the change. I was less thrilled when I discovered that I'd still have to go back to every single vendor one more time to set the flag that confirmed I'd visited in person. 

Surprisingly, it seems no-one had thought to record that information until a use was created for it, which certainly tells you plenty about how on-the-fly some of these changes are being made. I would have thought it would have been obvious from the start that we'd end up here sooner or later but apparently not.

And on the subject of things you'd have thought would have been there from the start, lead quest-giver Nellie Bly now has voice acting. I wonder if the eventual plan is to have all NPCs voiced? It seems like a lot of work and expense to retro-fit them all, especially since the impact will be lost on almost everyone currently playing. I mean, I'm not going to able to hear much of what Nellie has to say, seeing that I've finished all her quests. 

I will go visit her to hear what she sounds like, all the same. She has some incidental dialog she repeats. I'm almost curious enough to make a second character so I can hear the rest, though. Puck was very entertaining to listen to so if the standard is maintained, it might be worth it. I guess I ought to hold off for now in case they add more, though. I bet they'll do Dr. Frankenstein next!

There's been a UI makeover. It's been a while since I last played so I'm not one hundred per cent sure what's new and what I've just forgotten was there already but I have to say the whole thing feels smarter, cleverer and all-round better than I remember. It still looks a bit like it was designed by someone who usually does intertitles for silent movies but functionally it's a definite improvement.

Everyone can dodge now, apparently. This one confused me a bit. I wasn't aware anyone could dodge. I certainly haven't been doing it. Maybe I'll start, now I know I can.

Building costs have been "tweaked", by which ambiguous term they do for once mean "reduced". By a lot, in fact. This is quite significant for me inasmuch as it was specifically the large quantities of mats required that put me off building a new home using the more advanced building options I'd acquired in the late game. That alone would give me something to do for a good few hours more.

Which brings me neatly back to the potential impact of this update on both keeping the players Nightingale still has and bringing back some of those who've found other things to do. News of the update was enough to get me to take a look and from my comments on the list above it does appear there's at least a chance I might hang around for a while.

A glance at the Steam charts for the two days since the update dropped, however, doesn't feel quite so cheery. There's just the tiniest blip of interest visible. Comparing the Wednesday before the patch with yesterday, peak population rose by just a couple of hundred. Maybe the weekend will see a better turnout but even if it hits the dizzy heights of a couple of thousand it'll still be less than ten percent of what it was back in Februray, when the game went into Early Access.

And there we have it. The familiar pattern. Wilhelm posted something very interesting a while ago about the tendency of MMORPGs that reach their ten-year anniversary to just keep on going. ArcheAge look like it's about to buck that trend but generally it seems quite reassuring for people playing - and running - games that go back more than a decade. I have to wonder, though, which new games are going to be joining the Decadian Club ten years from now?

At the moment the pattern seems to be a huge influx of players at the moment the game becomes publicly available, be that Early Access, Open Beta or an official Launch, swiftly followed by a swift and precipitous decline, frequently representing the loss of well over 90% of everyone who was there for the first week or two.

When that still leaves well over hundred thousand players, which was Palworld's peak population last month, the future may still be rosy enough. If attrition in the first quarter takes you down to a mere couple of thousand active players, though, which is where Nightingale finds itself, you do have to wonder how long the game can go on.

I guess one way to spike interest is to persuade someone to make a hit TV show based on your game. I did wonder if that might the big announcement New World has planned for June. Nightingale would make a great TV show, if anyone's interested...

Starting As You Don't Mean To Carry On

Since I'm completely stuck for anything to write about today and since I did say I was going to do it, I guess we might as well have that list of TV shows I started but didn't finish. Always assuming I can remember what they were, that is. And why I stopped watching them.

Here they are, in no particular order, apart from a slight bias towards the few I can actually recall something about without having to look them up...

Loudermilk 

I watched just one episode of this. I didn't hate it but I didn't much like it, either. 

The premise looked promising - an ex-music journalist and recovering addict remakes himself as a "brutally honest sobriety counselor" - but the execution, at least in the first episode, felt lackluster and labored. I fully realize it takes most shows a while to get going but this isn't a sitcom with a twenty-six episode season arc. It's a ten episode dramedy and those really need to kick harder off the wall.

The real reason I didn't follow through, though, was Loudermilk himself. I just didn't like him. I didn't find him appealing or endearing or sympathetic. I found him smug and annoying. In something like this, if you don't enjoy the star turn there's very little prospect of the rest of the cast picking up the slack and given I didn't much like any of them either...

I was a bit disappointed I didn't enjoy it more. I'd had it in mind for a while to give the show a try and then Wilhelm included it in one of his TV posts, saying he hoped it would "scratch a bit of the Brockmire itch". I'd also watched Brockmire and enjoyed it and I would have liked more of the same or at least a passable facsimile.

Brockmire

Which makes me wonder now why I didn't just watch more Brockmire. I mean, there was more I hadn't watched already. A whole season, in fact. Actually, now I come to look into it further, three whole seasons.

And here we go again. Until I wrote this post I was under the impression there were only two seasons of Brockmire. There are, in fact, four. Last year, when I was watching it on Amazon Prime UK, only the first two seasons were available and there was no mention of Seasons Three and Four at all.

This time, though, lack of access wasn't the reason I stoppped. I stopped with Season One because at the end, Brockmire decides to take a new job in another town, leaving behind the entire supporting cast except for the one I wasn't all that keen on.

Obviously, I should have trusted the process and carried on watching to see where the show was going to go. For all I know, the move could have been a total disaster and Brockmire could have been back where he started in S2E2. 

The truth is, I wanted Season Two to carry on just the same as Season One and when it didn't I threw a hissy fit and walked away. I've always intended to go back and try again and now I know there are actually three more seasons I'm more interested than ever. Let's hope my VPN can make that happen because the show isn't available in the UK at all any more.

Blue Period

An anime in which an enervated, bored, popular high school student decides, for some inchoate reason, to slum it with the art kids, only to discover he has a hidden talent for painting. Or something like that. I expect he also falls in love or gets a crush on someone or learns some life lessons, too. All of the above, probably.

I thought it sounded promising and once again I didn't hate it but it didn't hold my attention for more than a single episode. I can remember bits of the plot and a few scenes so it can't have been entirely uninvolving but when you get to the end of the first episode of a character-driven show, the minimum expectation is that you should want to know what happens to the characters next. 

I didn't and I still don't.

Pluto 

Another anime. It's an eight episode limited series and I this time I got half way through before I stopped. My reason for bailing was pretty much the opposite of the one I gave just now.

The premise of Pluto is that there are a small number of exceptionally advanced, intelligent, self-aware robots and someone is killing them all, one by one. That's right. It's an AI serial killer show.

It's beautifully animated. It looks gorgeous. The writing is supple and subtle. The characters are distinct and memorable. The plot is compelling. Each episode is around an hour long so there's time for a huge amount of detail and backstory and world-building, all of which is done well.

So why didn't I finish it? Simple. I just found it too emotionally draining to continue. It was wearing me out. 

The whole show is steeped not just in emotion but in the examination of emotion. Having some of the central characters be robots allows for a continual comparison between what is real and what is artificial, what is valid and what is surrogate. I found it exhausting, especially late at night, like going to bed with a philosophy textbook.

The main reason I couldn't keep up with it, though, were the robots themselves. The show does an excellent job of  presenting these few, special machines as unique and irreplaceable, making it a harrowing experience to see one destroyed forever in each episode.

My sense was that, even if the central character, himself one of the special robots, now acting as a detective, was to solve the case, find and stop the killer and survive the final episode, at best it would be a Pyrrhic victory. By then he'd be the only one left. It would be like watching fire destroy an entire art gallery and having the fire finally go out leaving just one painting unburned.

I will go back and finish this one at some point but I'll really have to be in the mood for it.

Little Witch Academia

And on the exact other end of the entertainment spectrum...

I watched this after a run of super-heavy, emotionally draining shows, including the last one. I was hoping to relax with some silliness. To be fair to the show, there is plenty of that but even in the two or three early episodes I saw, I found myself watching with a creeping sense of foreboding. Very much not what I was either expecting or looking for.

It's a perennial problem with many institutionally-set shows. This one happens to be set in a school but it could just as easily be a hospital or an office or a prison. There has to be dramatic tension and in institutional settings that tension almost always turns inwards on itself.

The particular premise here is that a girl from a humble background gets a place at a school for witches but the place turns out to be full of snobs, bullies and disciplinarians. After only a couple of episodes I could see we were in for an endless series of battles with authority, tradition and repression, during which, over time, the virtues of our hero's kind, empathic persona would slowly - oh so very slowly - work to change hearts and minds. 

I've recently started watching the similarly-named My Hero Academia and it suffers from much the same problem. To many shows do.

It's all very well to teach life-lessons but they can be excruciating to have to live through, even vicariously. How many times do you really want to see the character you're supposed to be associating yourself most closely with be humiliated, embarrassed and made to look and feel inadequate before you reach the catharsis of their ultimate vindication?

Or, in other words, does there really need to be quite so much Shawshank before every Redemption? Maybe there does. There always is, after all. And usually I can handle it. This time, though, I really wasn't in the mood.

The Great Pretender

More anime. I lasted three or four episodes with this one and I liked it but it had something of the opposite problem from either Pluto or Little Witch Academia and that sunk it for me in the end. 

The elevator pitch for this one is that Japan's greatest con artist meets another scammer who's even better at defrauding people than he is. What that doesn't tell you is that they're both total gits.

Watching two self-satisfied, arrogant liars try to out-lie each other for twenty-five minutes does not, in my opinion, make for great entertainment. Once again, the writing seemed fine and there's every chance all of this was going somewhere, but for me to go with it long enough to find out where that might be, the two leads would have to be a damned sight less obnoxious. 

When you're being asked to spend time with fictional criminals, I never feel it's a good sign when you really, really want the police to catch them and bang them up for good. Or for their intended victims to catch them at it and give them a good kicking. Either would be fine.

One Piece

By no means the last show I've quit on but the last I can remember right now. This was one of Netflix' big shows of last year. The trailer looked good and I was looking forward to it. When it started, a friend watched it and told me it was great. I watched the first episode and...

It was a bit dull. I kept meaning to go back and watch the rest but so far I haven't and the longer we go on, the less likely that seems. Maybe one day.

At least it's one episode ahead of Fallout or The Three Body Problem, neither of which I seem to be able to start watching at all. Once again, I thought I was looking forward to both of them but apparently I'd rather watch old CW shows, now I can access them through my VPN.  

The Flash starts out really well and there are nine seasons of that one. Pretty sure I'm going to watch them all.

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".