Thursday Grab-Bag

As we draw near to the last days (Of Blaugust! Put that bug out bag back!) I feel I don't need to hoard my ideas like a cartoon dragon trying to spread all four limbs and a tail across a heap of gold coins. With just five days to go, I think I ought to be able to come up with something for each of them without having to stretch an idea worth a couple of paragraphs into a full post.

And with that in mind, it's Grab Bag time. Three or four things that would strain anyone's patience, stretched to fill, but which might slip down easily enough in small bites. Hmm. Not sure that even qualifies as a mixed metaphor. Oh well. On we go. Keep moving, hope no-one notices...

Ananta launches on 15 January 2027.  

The gaming feeds have been busy this week with announcements and reveals from Gamescom 26. I can't fathom these things. I skim the news and maybe one item in twenty vaguely piques my interest. It's a whole lot of information I don't need about games I'll never play.

Occasionally, though, a bright, shining sliver of joy bursts free from the grey clump and this time it's an actual release date! Glory be!

The game in question, top of my list, pingingest on my radar, most anticipated, wanted, desired and devoutly to be wished for, is, of course, Ananta. I want it so much I can even remember what it's called without having to look it up. Pays to have a short, easy-to-remember title. 

Ananta, in case you haven't been paying attention, is "the anime GTA". Obviously, that's not what developer Naked Rain or publisher NetEase is calling it but everyone else is. Although not me because I've never played GTA. I'm calling it NTE on steroids.

Okay, no I'm not but you get the idea. You can judge for yourself how accurate any of those comparisons might be from the latest promo video. It's a good one. 

The game has a slightly strange premise. As the central character, known only as Captain, you have to find your missing father and rebuild the failing peace agency you work for and you have to do it by... becoming an internet influencer. 

I'll hand that off for now. Don't want to thnk about it. 

More cogently, the game features not one but two huge metropolises, Nova City and Chongxiao, the latter supposedly "a fully explorable sandbox featuring recreational destinations including gyms, restaurants, mahjong parlors, cat and maid cafes, clothing stores, hot springs, and more." 

I'm guessing both cities are "fully explorable" but maybe Nova City is where the plot happens and Chonxiao is more of a simulation? Speculate away because in just four months all will be revealed. 

That's perfect timing for me. Who does anything in January? Plus I'll be retired then. I can play all day!

I Wish I'd Spent More Time Playing Video Games

I've often fancied having that on my tombstone. Or as my Famous Last Words. Which brings me to a somewhat embarrassing confession. I'm about to out myself as a gamer who doesn't actually play any games.

Okay, that's a slight exaggeration but only a very slight one. I had cause to look at my GeForce Now account page for the first time yesterday and I happened to notice there's a section where you can see your "Playtime History". Out of curiosity, I took a glance at it. Then I did one of those cartoon double-takes. Then I really took a look at it.

Oh boy. 

 

I'm not and never have been one of those gamers who keeps meticulous track of how much they play, which game and for how long. I don't keep spreadsheets or run any of those apps that track your gaming time for you. I don't care, frankly. Why would I?

Since I started playing most of my games through Steam, of course, I've had some of that information to hand, since Steam records it whether you want it or not. I sometimes sort my library by "Hours Played". I also often glance at the timer at the end of a session to see how long it took, something I also do occasionally, but less frequently, on GeForce Now because there it requires an extra button-press.

That's for specifics and it can be quite interesting. For a more general idea of how much I've been playing in any given week or month, though, I've never felt the need to refer to any kind of statistical record. I've always, instinctively and without trying, been able to say roughly how many hours I've spent gaming over any given period. 

Or so I thought. Apparently not any more. In the last month or so, I've pretty much only played games on GeForce Now, so what's recorded there is almost a full tally of my hours played. I did play one session of Stars Reach directly on Steam before Playable Worlds added it to GFN, so that was about another hour and I think maybe I logged into EverQuest II once, for no more than half an hour at most. 

 

Excluding that possible extra 90 minutes, my entire total time spent playing video games between August 8 and August 27 - just under three weeks - comes to six hours and forty-one minutes. Add it in and you get a grand total of just over eight hours at most. That means I've played, on average, less than thirty minutes a day for most of this month. Many of the sessions are less than half an hour and there are multiple days when I didn't log in at all.

If you'd asked me, I'd have said I was playing at least twice that. Maybe more like three times. I wouldn't have been lying. I'd just have been very wrong.

In the measured period, I've played just one session that lasted over an hour. That was on August 21, when the new update landed in Neverness To Everness. Outside the time-frame, I also played a couple sessions of similar length in Wuthering Waves, which I know because I mentioned it in a post on August 9, when I wrote that the content I'd just completed " took me several hours to finish". 

Adding that in, I'd estimate I've probably played maybe as much as sixteen hours in the calendar month, which still comes to not much more than half an hour a day. I mean, I knew I wasn't playing as much as I used to but I hadn't realised I'd turned into a half-hour-a-day gamer!

Something will have to be done!

Where Does The Time Go?

That brings up the inevitable question of what have I been spending my time doing? It's an easy one to answer. I estimate that, during August, I've spent at least three hours every day writing a blog post and at least an hour, probably more like two, reading and commenting on other people's posts. Blaugust probably accounts for five hours of every day.  

Every day. Are we in Lessons Learned week yet? Because if so, the lesson I've learned is that that's too much.

I've also spent at least two hours every evening making songs on Suno. There will be a post about that but out of politeness to some delicate sensibilities, I'm saving it for after Blaugust ends. 

Beryl accounts for about two to three hours a day, walking and playing. Computer problems, legal and financial stuff and household chores probably take up another two or three. That's already about a dozen hours a day. Add in meals and sleep and general, unspecified stuff and it's amazing I've been able to fit any gaming in at all! And that's on the five days a week I don't have to go to work.

The end of Blaugust, wetter, colder weather, less daylight, the conclusion of the wrapping up of my mother's estate and my full retirement should all lead to much more time being available for gaming in the autumn and winter. Maybe I can even get up to the couple of hours a day I thought it already was!

I swear, I played literally five times as much when I had a full-time job. Time is so weird.

Walks Like A Duck

I mentioned computer problems in the last section. I'm pleased to say I have now resolved at least one of those. With ChatGPT's help, I managed to find and recover the missing product key to activate the new installation of Windows so I don't have to look at that irritating ghostly reminder message any more. 

It was a strange conclusion to the whole affair. I bought an enclosure for the suspect M2 drive and ChatGPT talked me through several means of interrogating it to try and figure out if the errant key was lurking somewhere in the data. As we were trying various things, I just happened to notice a document file titled "Windows Key".   

After all the endless searching through registries and running commands it turned out the damn thing was sitting there in a named file in the root directory. I didn't put it there. I can only assume it was already there when I got the machine because it was dated two weeks before I bought it!

You might well think the person I spoke to at the helpdesk of the company that supplied the PC might have known that. It would have saved me one hell of a lot of time and effort. Instead, they gave me two random keys that didn't work and then washed their hands of it. Doesn't inspire a lot of confidence.

In the end, I can't even say I needed ChatGPT's help, incredibly thorough, detailed and accurate though it was. I could just have bought the enclosure, found the drive was readable, seen the file, opened it, tried the key and it would have worked. 

Nevertheless, I did find working with ChatGPT to be thoroughly satisfactory and indeed enjoyable process. Certainly a superior experience to most I've had, working with humans in similar situations. Not only was the AI patient and calm, it was constantly reassuring and on several occasions objectively empathic. This is not projection. It's self-evident in the logs.

Again, I'm most likely going to do a full post about this when Blaugust is out of the way but I'm of the opinion that it doesn't necessarily matter if software is sentient, provided it gives the impression of sentience. I know full well no extant AI has either autonomy or self-awareness but I'm a lot less convinced that's as relevant as we think it is. Consciousness is overrated.

Goodbye, Dolly 

And finally, in honor of the passing of a legend, we'd best have something by Dolly. Everyone knew her, even those who'd never listened to a country song in their lives. And it seems everyone loved her. Not many stars of any stripe can claim such universal affection. 

Given the length of her career and the extent of her fame, I find it slightly shaming I only know that same half dozen of her hits everyone knows. I can't say I've ever even heard anything else but then I certainly never went looking. 

Here she is, duetting with Porter Wagoner in the early 'seventies. As they say every day on Radio 4 Extra, it contains attitudes of the time so be warned. 

They were a professional duo for a decade and the break-up was difficult. When she wanted to quit, she wrote "I Will Always Love You" to "express what I feel and have him understand" and she sang it to him when she went to tell him she wanted out. How about that for a letter of resignation?

And she wrote Jolene the same day.  Geez. Save something for the rest of us, Dolly!

International Dog Day

 Today is International Dog Day. I know, I know... every goddam day is international something day but this is dogs. It's a big one.

According to Wikipedia (Who are asking me for money again and I suppose I probably ought to give them some, since I link to them all the fricken' time...) it's

"...an annual observance held on August 26 to celebrate dogs of all breeds and backgrounds, promote dog adoption, and raise awareness about the welfare of dogs around the world. It also recognizes working dogs and the roles they play in human society, including service, police, military, and search and rescue dogs." 

It hasn't been going that long. It started in the USA in 2004 and spread, although not, apparently, all that successfully to where I live. I could only find one local event linked to it and that's a party for dogs at a pub in town. I'd link to it but all the info is either on Facebook or Instagram and I don't like to encourage that sort of thing. The event starts in an hour and I very much doubt I'll even have finished this post by then, so it's a bit of a moot point anyway. 

Instead, in honor and celebration of the day and because I thought it would make for a nice, quick, easy post for Blaugust, I thought I'd do a list: "Ten Things You Didn't Know About Beryl". I even had ten pictures to go along with it that I took this morning, when we were out on a walk, so they're good and fresh, which is more than I can say about Beryl.

Unfortunately, when I sat down to write the post, I couldn't think of ten things to say about Beryl or at least not ten that didn't make either her or us sound deranged. Plus, ten pictures take up a heck of a lot of space in a post, unless you make them really tiny. 

So it might end up being fewer on both counts. Maybe a lot fewer. We'll have to see how we go. Here's the first fact, anyway. 

1. Until she was something like two years old, Beryl really wasn't all that interested in food.  Half the time she had to be persuaded to eat and treats didn't really motivate her much. That led to us feeding her by hand a lot, which we still do, much of the time. Well, I do. Mrs Bhagpuss says she has more sense. It also means that, of late, we've had to train ourselves out of feeding Beryl on demand or praising her just for eating something because now she's often eating as much as she can get, just like any other dog. Well, so long as it something she likes. She can still be very picky, at least by dog standards.

2. Possibly related to her earlier disinterest in eating, Beryl will not take any treats from strangers, even if they're her favorites. She also won't drink from any bowl put out by kind, thoughtful dog-lovers in hot weather, even if she's really thirsty. She seems to think everyone is out to poison her. There's certainly no need to warn her about stranger danger. Except...

3. Beryl loves old ladies. Pretty much any old lady will do. She's not discriminating. She has three modes when meeting strangers: suspicious, aloof and enthusiastic. She's suspicious of most people who appear to want to pet her. She backs away and has nothing to do with them. That's her most common response. Less often, she just stands there and lets petting happen to her, without in any way participating in or endorsing it. When it's an old lady, though, she acts as if she's just met a long-lost friend. She pants and simpers and stands up on her hind legs like some kind of performing... erm... dog. Of the three, the only one that isn't potentially embarrassing (For us, not Beryl, who is impossible to embarrass, like all dogs.) is her neutral stance. 

4. Beryl used have just a few favorite places to sleep but in the last few months she seems to have decided anywhere will do. She particularly likes sleeping in doorways. She tried the back door, the door to the living room, and all the bedroom doors but her favorite is possibly the bathroom, which is great fun if you need to get up in the middle of the night for a pee. Today she decided to try the kitchen doorway for a change. We think she may be trying to kill us.

5. Although she looks like a cuddly lap-dog, Beryl is an excellent watchdog. She's alert to the slightest unusual sound, even when she seems to be asleep. She doesn't bark much but as soon as there's any hint of a threat, like someone trying to deliver a parcel or ask if we've found Jesus yet, she barks fit to raise the dead. Scares the life out of me, sometimes. 

6. She may be ever-alert to potential human intruders but as she gets older and wiser she's becoming more and more laid back about other animals. She used to chase madly after birds or squirrels but now she mostly just looks at them with disdain. The two exceptions are cats that think they can take a short cut through our garden and pigeons that think it's fine to sit on the corrugated plastic roof of the conservatory. If she gets even the slightest hint that either of those abominations might be happening, she goes berserk. The cats then climb up something and sneer at her and the pigeons, already being well out of reach, just ignore her. She'll probably get the message that she's never going to reach them eventually and then she'll pretend she never cared in the first place, just like she has with the squirrels.

7. Unlike most dogs, Beryl loves going to the vet. Our vet's, which is an actual animal hospital, is five minutes' walk away and when we go there, as soon as we get near to the entrance she starts pulling to go in. She must be the only dog that runs up the path to get into the vet's. Once she's through the door, she's straight onto the scales to weigh herself, something she also does in the Garden Center pet shop, where they too have a stand-on weigh-your-dog device. She only starts to look nervous if she has to go past reception into the back, where the examination rooms are, but even then she's about ten times less anxious about it than she is when she thinks she's going to the dog groomer. She is not a fan of bathing and blow-drying.

8. She's not a fan of swimming, either. She likes to go in water but only up to her knees (If dogs have knees.) Even if other dogs are swimming, she won't join in. It might be because once, when she was a puppy, we were walking across some unfamiliar fields and we came up a slope and Beryl, who was on her lead but forging ahead, walked onto a nice, flat patch of very green grass that turned out not to be grass at all. It was duckweed floating on the surface of a deep pond. She went straight through and disappeared, completely out of sight underwater. It was like a cartoon. I'm surprised she didn't stand there for a second, do a double-take, then sink. Since she was in a harness, I just yanked her straight up and out and she shot into the air and landed back on dry land about a second later. I don't think she had any idea what had happened except that she was somehow soaking wet. An experience like that would make you think twice around water in future, I guess, although future, I guess, although really it ought to be grass you'd need to be suspicious of.

 9. Beryl likes both town and country walks but mostly she likes walks that go somewhere interesting and preferably somewhere new. For a small, fluffy dog she's very adventurous. She'd be quite hard to place in a classic D&D alignment. She's very lawful when it comes to following paths, for example. She does not like to take short-cuts or deviate from the designated route and she looks at us sternly if we do. If  there's a closed gate with a dog-sized gap next to it, she'll wait for the gate to be opened rather than go through the hole. But if there's some free exploration to be had, like climbing up or scrambling down slopes, she can be positively chaotic. Little excites her more than a good clamber.

10. Beryl loves to play. Just not with other dogs. Or outside. Playing is for indoors, with humans. If a dog tries to get her to play, she looks at them like they're having some kind of psychotic break. In four and a half years I think I've seen her play with other dogs fewer than half a dozen times and for less than five minutes in total. Conversely, every single evening without fail she comes to me and demands I play with her for at least half an hour. In the house she'll chase a squeaky toy, pick it up and bring it back for another go over and over again but try it outdoors and she'll look at you like you've lost your reason. 

Phew! There we go. Ten things. I'm not saying they're ten interesting things but then that was never in the contract. As for pictures, five seems about right. 

Have a great rest of your International Dog Day! 

May The GeForce Be With You

Following on from yesterday's post (Which is still today's post as I'm writing this.) I thought I'd say something about GeForce Now. 

Eh? What? Was there something in that post about GFN? I don't remember anything...

No, there wasn't. But what there was was me saying I hadn't had to post anything "desperate" yet to keep up with my Blaugust schedule. Yes, well, that may be true but there have been a couple of posts that I definitely wouldn't have published (Or probably written.) if I hadn't been on this post-a-day kick. 

This is another of those.

It has to be because I'm working tomorrow and work and blog posts, especially solid, researched, well-thought-out, substantive blog posts that take three-to-five hours to write, don't mix. They might if Beryl didn't have a say in it but she does so there it is.

I am doing my best to keep the bonus, work-day posts to topics I would have posted about anyway, only without Blaugust they might well have been sections in a Grab Bag, rather than autonomous postings in their own right. Luckily, tomorrow is the last day in August I'm working so this should be the last time I have to scrub up something the day before. This is the third time this month I've had to write two posts in one day, or at least a post and a half, and I'll be very happy not to have to do it a fourth.

So, then: GeForce Now. It was a bit of a punt when I decided to pay for a year's subscription up front a couple of months back. I'm not much of an impulse buyer but I can be tempted by a good deal and the price they were offering certainly looked like one of those. Had I ended up not using it much, it'd have been a false economy, If I'd hardly used it at all it would have been a complete waste of money. I think I can say already that it won't be either.

I've used my GeForce Now subscription pretty much every day since I got it. I've played quite a few sessions that exceeded the free version's one hour limit (I think three hours was the longest.) and I've played all of them on the powerful subscriber-only machines at the highest graphic settings, with no lag or performance issues at all. 

 

The whole thing has been extremely smooth and efficient. Everything just works, first time, no questions. The UI is attractive and practical. I can easily see what games I can play, including a good percentage of my Steam games, now I've linked the two platforms. I have more choice than I need by a wide margin.

Mostly I've been playing on my desktop, which is working just fine again now I changed the drive the OS was on, but I've played a few sessions of Neverness To Everness on the laptop, where it runs perfectly. I even tried to play on the big TV downstairs, since it hosts GeForce Now natively, but it wasn't practical because the TV won't recognize a keyboard as a controller. Not GFN's fault and at least I have a wireless keyboard now. 

In fact, since I subbed to the cloud gaming service I have barely played anything on my own machines. I did play a session of Stars Reach on the desktop when it went into Early Access. It was okay but the PC crashed as soon as I logged out. I believe that's what started the problem I started having a few months ago and I don't want to repeat the same process and corrupt the new Windows installation, so I was thinking that would be my last run in Stars Reach for the foreseeable future.

And then Playable Worlds suddenly announced that due to "popular demand" Stars Reach would be available on GeForce Now. I was delighted but also astonished. How did that happen?

Firstly, what's all that about "popular demand"?  Stars Reach has been on Steam since it began. If there was any problem with that, as far as the testers were concerned, it must have passed me by. I'd have guessed the core audience for the game was pretty conservative. If anything, I'd have imagined they might have preferred a standalone client even to Steam. I mean, they seem to want everything else to be like it was in 2003.

I definitely wouldn't have bet on there being a significant faction that would prefer to play Stars Reach on a third-party, cloud gaming, streaming platform. Especially one for which they'd have to pay an additional fee if they wanted anything more than a bare-bones service.

 

So there's that. And then there's the question of numbers. Just how low is the bar to get your game onto GeForce Now, anyway? Even putting it in the most positive, favorable light, Stars Reach Early Access is a niche game. Steam pegs the EA peak at just under 700, and that's already fallen by 50%  in the first week.

I don't really know how GFN works but presumably they have to open a discrete client for each account that logs into any given game. I just asked Gemini and it tells me, via reddit, that "GeForce NOW assigns a completely separate, isolated virtual machine (VM) and a distinct game client instance for every single user session". So, yes they do. 

I suppose, on one level, a game that few people play puts very little demand on the system, so maybe they're happy to have any old thing on there. I know I could play Cloudpunk or NeoCab, for example. Cloudpunk currently has about the same number of people playing as Stars Reach. NeoCab has five.

I hope that is the case because I'm already starting to see GeForce Now in much the way I've come to see Steam, as my preferred portal for gaming. For a while now, if a game's on Steam I've been more likely to play it than if I had to sign up for some other platform and now I'm starting to feel I'm more likely to play something if I don't have to run it on my own hardware at all. 

It saves so much time and effort with updating, for a start. And it means I don't need even an entry-level gaming machine. Any device that can connect to the internet would do, although in practice, because of the games I play and how I like to play them, it does need to be something with a decent keyboard and mouse option. And once you start talking about connecting a bluetooth mouse and keyboard to your phone you probably need to get on your water-skis and have Ritchie aim the speedboat for the nearest shark.

There is, of course, the ever-present question of how long any of these services will last. I certainly wouldn't be paying any annual sub to play on Amazon's Luna. I'm beginning to think, though, that given the spiralling costs of consoles and gaming PCs, cloud gaming might actually be the future the companies behind it were trying to tell us it was going to be a few years ago. 

And frankly it's ridiculously cheap at the moment. My annual sub to GFN is less than what my my annual sub to Daybreak All Access will be next month, if I renew it. And I guess maybe I shouldn't because I've barely set foot in Norrath for months.

 

I'd be more inclined to keep the Daybreak sub if I could play EverQuest II and DCUO on GeForce Now. There are 4000 games you can play on the service but neither of those is on there. According to Gemini, that's down to " publisher Daybreak Games' virtual machine restrictions and policies." I think we can be certain more people are playing either of them than have ever played Stars Reach (And possibly ever will...) so it can't be that NVidia doesn't think they're popular enough to merit a slot.

It's all a bit confusing for me. At some point I'm going to have to decide whether to pay upwards of a thousand pounds for a moderately capable gaming PC just so I can play the kinds of games that don't make it onto GeForce Now, or I could choose to stick with what is on there, which is already orders of magnitude more titles than I'm ever going to play, and save myself all that money.

While there's no guarantee GFN's subscription charges will stay as low as they are now, they'd have to go up one hell of a lot before buying a PC or a console would start to look like the more economical deal. And prices for hardware are only going to increase, even in the short term. GFN could treble their prices and I'm still not sure it would cost more over five years than buying and upgrading a low-end gaming PC over the same period. If you're talking about a gaming PC that's the equivalent of the ones my games are running on at GFN then forget it. It'd take a decade to catch up with those costs. 

But you do want to be able to play anything you want, don't you? It's a dilemma. I'd better just hope nothing really amazing comes out in the next few years that I have to play but which for some reason doesn't end up on a cloud gaming service. And also that cloud gaming doesn't go the way streaming movies and TV has, so you have to keep swapping from one to another to keep up with where your favorites have gone.

As for Stars Reach, I'm afraid to say that playing it at maximum graphical fidelity with no appreciable lag did not markedly improve the gameplay. In fact, with all of the friction removed, it was just easier to notice how dull it was to play. My first and so far only session with the Stars in the cloud lasted barely half an hour and I quit because I was really quite bored.

I'll put up with a lot of things to play a game - lag, stuttering, rubber-banding, bugs, glitches - but I won't put up with boredom. That's a game killer.

 

Notes on AI used in this post.

I asked Gemini two questions. The questions and the results are documented in the text.  

There's No Motivation...

It's Week Four of Blaugust and we're into Staying Motivated Week. Krikket was kind enough to post a list of questions back when all this started and I think I'm just going to answer them. Sounds like that'll just take a lowish level of motivation, which is about as much as I can summon up today.

Here they are in bullet point format:

• What tricks do you use to keep yourself motivated when something feels impossible?
• What are your blogging goals? Do you think participating in Blaugust is getting you closer to where you want be?
• What do you think you’ll get out of completing your Blaugust goals?
• What drives you to blog?
• Are you happy with your Blaugust so far? If so, why? If not, why not?
• How important is goal setting & reaching your goals to you overall?
• Did you read any posts during Blaugust (or before) that you found particularly inspirational? Share them!

You know what? I'm going to replace those bullet points with numbers.

1. What tricks do you use to keep yourself motivated when something feels impossible?
2. What are your blogging goals? Do you think participating in Blaugust is getting you closer to where you want be?
3. What do you think you’ll get out of completing your Blaugust goals?
4. What drives you to blog?
5. Are you happy with your Blaugust so far? If so, why? If not, why not?
6. How important is goal setting & reaching your goals to you overall?
7. Did you read any posts during Blaugust (or before) that you found particularly inspirational? Share them!

Is that better? I think it makes the whole thing look more official, don't you?

1.  What tricks do you use to keep yourself motivated when something feels impossible?

Well, one thing I do is mess around with the form to keep myself amused. Like, I might take a set of questions, copy them, paste them, look at them and think "Those would be easier to answer if they were numbered." Which, obviously, they wouldn't, so that's an affectation. Then I'd cut and paste them a second time and change the bullet points to numbers. And then I'd write something about how that's what I'd done, as if it mattered.

It's completely pointless but it's fun. Doing things like Sidebars, Footnotes and Edits, having an imaginary conversation with myself or the imagined reader, interrupting the flow, using tenses that don't seem to sit well together and figuring out how to make them work grammatically, getting all meta and self-referential and generally arsing about. All those keep me motivated.

Also, ignoring the question I've been asked and answering the one I thought I'd been asked or that I wished I'd been asked. That's a good one. And writing the post that wants to be written instead of the post I thought I wanted to write.  Never be afraid to take a hard turn into something you hadn't planned to post about. 

That's actually a serious point, that last one. Look, I've highlighted it to make it stand out, so it must be. Also, playing around with the fonts and the colors is another good one. I don't do that often enough.

As for tricks, when something other than writing a post feels impossible, I don't know! What d'you think this is? Therapy?

2.  What are your blogging goals? Do you think participating in Blaugust is getting you closer to where you want be?

Hmm. Do I have blogging goals?  I'm not at all sure that I do. I think I had some, once. I probably started out hoping that someone would read what I posted and leave a comment. And then that happened and for a while I hoped more people would read and comment. And that happened. And then I kind of stopped caring so much about al of that and instead what I mostly hoped was that the same people who were already reading and commenting wouldn't stop. Which has mostly happened although if I go back and look at comments of years past, it's unsettling how many regulars just disappear. Luckily, new ones appear to take their place. Sometimes.

As far as all of that goes, Blaugust is, if anything, counterproductive to my goals. I've said before that while I don't trust any of the stats I get from Google and Blogger, they can at least be compared against themselves for consistency and what they tell me every year is that fewer people seem to look at this blog during Blaugust than at almost any other time. 

I'm not saying it's my participation that causes it so much as that, when Blaugust comes around, there are more posts for everyone to read and attention gets stretched thin. I find myself reading more widely but less deeply. I'm skim-reading posts on blogs I normally read in full and slipping posts on blogs I usually skim. I bet a lot of other people are, too.

You might think that any loss of attention from regular readers would be more than made up for by the influx of new ones from all those extra Blaugust blogs but I get the strong feeling almost none of those bloggers pay attention to this blog at all. Certainly few of them leave comments, this year or any year. And I suspect, from things they say one their own blogs, that they don't much care for the more traditional, long-form, comment-enabled gaming blogs. Why should they? It's just a bunch of old people, posting about old-people stuff, in an old-people sort of way.

So, no, I don't think participating in Blaugust is getting me much closer to where I want to be but it would be a lot easier to tell for sure if I had any idea where that was. Which I don't. Not really. I guess I mostly just want to stay where I am and not go anywhere in particular.

 

3.  What do you think you’ll get out of completing your Blaugust goals? 

Didn't we just cover that in the last question? I haven't got any... oh, wait! Blaugust goals. Not blogging goals. Geez. Good thing this isn't an exam. Remember how the teachers always used to say the most important thing is to read the question?

Okay then. Blaugust goals. Well, I started out saying I wasn't going to aim for 31 posts, which is exactly what I said last year, and then, again just like last year, I ended up doing precisely that. I've posted every day so far and I've made some considerable efforts to do do it, too. Apparently I can give advice about taking it easy and not getting wrapped up in hitting the numbers but I'm completely incapable of following it. As if that's news.

If we accept that 31 posts is a goal, even though I said it wasn't, (And we should because by their actions, not by their words, shall ye know them (Which sounds like a quote because of the archaic way I phrased it, with a "ye" even, but in fact I just made it up...)) then I guess I'll get the knowledge that, once again, I've proved I can stick at a pointless task for as long as it takes to finish it, even if I've said I wasn't going to do it in the first place. Go me!

If I'd said up front that I was going to post 31 times, I guess it would be a data point towards my being able to keep a promise, stick to a plan and generally do what I say I'll do.All of which would be good things. But since I specifically said I wasn't going to do that, I guess it suggests I can't be trusted.

In fact, if I was going to complete my Blaugust goal, (I still have a week to go so let's not tally the hens just yet.) I'd need to make sure there's at  least one day in what's left of August when I don't post anything. Then I' really would have completed my only goal. But what would I get out of that? I bet I'd be really annoyed with myself. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't get anything positive out of it. So I'm going to try not to do it.

Hit my goal by missing a post, that is. Was that not clear? 

4. What drives you to blog? 

Ooh! An easy one! A love of the sound of my own voice, obviously. That, plus an innate ability to sit in front of a keyboard and have words spew out of my fingertips without even thinking about it. If I found any of this hard, do you think I'd do it? Half the posts on this blog are about how much I hate a challenge. I like things that are easy and blogging is really, really easy. Not blogging would be a lot harder.

As for why I blog rather than, say, keep a diary or write in a journal, it's much the same reason: it's easy. Blogger does most of the work for me. I just have to write the words and stick in the pictures and it's a lot easier to do in Blogger than it would be writing it all out longhand and pasting the pictures into a scrapbook. 

Plus I like getting comments and chatting to people about what I've written and what they've written. There's a social element. You don't get that with a diary or a journal. Also, a blog is a diary and a journal, so it's a threefer.

 

5.  Are you happy with your Blaugust so far? If so, why? If not, why not?

Hmm. Am I happy with my Blaugust? My Blaugust? I guess so, if by that we mean what I've done. I've lied to myself about not intending to post 31 times but I didn't believe my own lies so that's good. I've posted two dozen times in two dozen days, so that's good. I haven't posted anything I'd call desperate just to keep the streak going, so that's good. 

If we mean am I happy with my experience of Blaugust overall, then in Steam review terms I think I'd have to give it a "Mixed". It's certainly been better than last year, when I got quite pissed off with the whole thing for a while and finished thinking it might be the last time I bothered with it. I've also learned a few things, about Blaugust and myself, but I'd better keep those for Lessons Learned Week. I'd hate to talk out of turn.

Blaugust, generally, has always been quite vexing, anyway. I'm not at all sure happiness is an emotional state I'd associate with it to begin with. Am I satisfied might be a more pertinent question. And yes, so far, I think I am.

6.  How important is goal setting & reaching your goals to you overall? 

Back to that again? This is all getting a bit goal-oriented, isn't it? Not to say goal-obsessed. I feel I'm at risk of repeating myself, although when has that ever bothered me? 

I'd say in the most general terms I like to have some vague idea of what I'm trying to achieve but not much more than that. I don't do goals, in the sense of specific outcomes, other than for practical issues where it can't be avoided. 

For those, it's extremely important to reach them as quickly and effectively as possible because then they go away. In life, as a whole, I prioritize the completion of goals that either have to be done by a specific deadline (And I very, very rarely miss a deadline.) or by how much I don't want to do them. The more I don't want to do something that, for practical reasons, I can't get out of doing, the sooner and the faster I get it done. 

That's for unavoidable necessities, though. I'm very much not in the habit of inventing "personal goals". I have things I fancy doing and I do them if I remember and when I feel like it. If I don't do them, who cares? Not me, that's for sure. I'm very happy with giving up on any project at any stage if I've lost interest or if something more exciting comes along. Usually, if that happens, and it happens often, I'll never think about whatever it was again. 

If I do remember it at some point, I might go back and carry on or I might just think "Oh, yeah, that was a thing I was going to do. Oh, well..." and put it back in the forget-about-it box. That's a great box. If you don't have one, you should get one.

 

7.  Did you read any posts during Blaugust (or before) that you found particularly inspirational? Share them! 

I do have one. I bookmarked it to use as the springboard for a post of my own and I may well write that post at some point but I'll throw in a link to it now.

It's a post by Bongo Twisty, one of the few new blogs I've discovered this Blaugust that I've really enjoyed. It's called "How do you know if someone hates AI?" and it sums up my own feelings on the controversy very well indeed. Go read it.

Better yet, go read the Substack post by Cedric that Bongo Twisty quotes. Cedric makes a number of excellent points about why the policing of AI in blog posts is likely to be more problematic than the AI usage itself. Worth bearing in mind for next year's Blaugust, I think.

I particularly liked the bit at the end, where Cedric informs Substack of the numerous ways their side-step into the role of Internet Policeman violates his legal rights under the EU's extremely serious GDPR legislation. I have to comply with that at work and I can tell you it is not something you want to mess with.

While we're on the subject, I'd suggest reading some Philip K Dick. Or Kazuo Ishiguro 's Klara and the Sun for a bit of perspective. Or maybe get one of those bags of flour you draw a face on and treat like a baby for a week. Only instead of a face, write the name of your most-hated AI on there instead.

There we go. Questionnaire complete. Did I pass?

Notes on AI used in this post.

I had a bit of a problem with the part where I changed the bullet points to numbers. Blogger kept indenting the numbered list too much so I copy-pasted the html into Gemini and asked it to explain what was wrong, which it did. Then Gemini asked if I'd like it to re-write the html for me so it would work properly and i said I would, thanks. 

I copy-pasted Gemini's version into Blogger and that didn't work either so I reverted to the old version and hand-altered it according to what Gemini had said was wrong with it and that worked perfectly. Which means there's no actual AI-generated content in this post, not even in the html, but there is the faint trace of some AI advice still hanging around like a miasma. 

I wonder if there's an AI detector that can catch something like that? The lingering scent of an AI that passed through, leaving no digital trace? If not, maybe we'd better all just give up on the internet altogether. We're never going to be certain what's human ever again, are we? 

Also, I used Snapedit to remove a few bits of UI from a couple of the screenshots. But as I've said before, I'm not convinced that's real AI. 

 

Duskwood By Night

 Since I knew I was going to be working on Sunday, on Saturday evening, after I'd come home from work, had tea, played with Beryl and caught up with my bloglog (That's a portmanteau I just now came up with for a backlog of blogs. Think it'll catch on? No, me neither.) I figured I'd better at least make a start on preparing a post for tomorrow. That's today if you're reading this on the day I'll be posting it. I think those are the right tenses. Don't you just love grammar?

I'd already decided on a screenshot post showcasing the new region, Duskmoor, the one got added to Neverness To Everness with the most recent update. I was thinking that, thanks to the miracle of GeForce Now, I could run around Duskmoor in bed on my laptop, a sentence wide open to misinterpretation, I know, but we're all gamers here, aren't we? I'm sure everyone knows what I mean.

  Once I got into the game and opened the map to figure out where to go first, it occurred to me right away that the obvious thing to do would be to visit all the Rero Boxes (Red phone booths.) and open up the teleport system for the new map. There are only three of them so it oughtn't to have taken long. (There go those tenses again...)

Except, as noted, Duskmoor is fricken huge! I started jogging towards the first box from where I left Flora last time, which was  at the entrance to the Fogden instance, then I realized it was a kilometer and a half away.

 I'm in the habit of running everywhere in Hetherau, by which  mean I open the map, locate the teleport location nearest to wherever it is I want to go, port there and jog the rest of the way. You can teleport to all sorts of things in NTE, not just the Rero Boxes, so there's usually something close by.

At least, there is in the city. Duskmoor is very much not in the city. Duskmoor is out of town and it's about 90% forest and lake, as far as I can tell, with a tourist and resort strip along the coast and not a whole hell of a lot of civilization anywhere else. 

But it does have highways. And I do have a car. I don't use it much but I have one. And I can drive it. Not very well, I'll grant you, but well enough to get around.

 I whistled for my trusty steed and along the road it came. With no-one at the wheel. How does that work? An Anomaly, I imagine. If anything odd happens in Hethereau, there's always an Anomaly behind it.

I got in and started to drive and in about ten seconds I realized why it is that Flora goes everywhere on foot. If only that unseen Anomaly could drive the car when she was in it, too. 

But wait! Maybe it can!

There's an auto-drive option. I've tried it before and never got it to work but there's always a first time. 

I hit the key to put the car into auto-drive and for the first time it I didn't get an error message about not having a target. The car set off down the road without Flora's hands on the wheel. It was night and we were careening along at top speed but fortunately traffic was light, although not, as it turned out, nearly light enough.

 I learned a few things on my trip through Duskwood.

1. Autodrive requires you to set a target destination before engaging. That's what I'd been doing wrong all those other times. 
2. Having the car drive itself does not mean you smash into other vehicles. In fact, on this evidence, I'd say it's even more reckless than Flora.
3. If you get out of your car and leave it in the middle of the road, a huge traffic jam will form behind it, even if it would be easy and legal for them all just to pass. Also, NPC drivers get really cross if you do that. 

 Even using auto-drive, which was a lot more efficient than having Flora take the wheel, even allowing for the collisions, it still took quite a while to drive the route that took me past all three Rero Boxes. I wasn't timing it but I'd guess it was something like fifteen or twenty minutes, counting the time Flora spent getting out and going to the boxes, all of which were very close to the road.

There was surprisingly little to see other than some very lovely scenery. Even the spots where the boxes were didn't seem to have a lot going on. It wasn't entirely clear why someone would have taken the trouble to place them there in the first place.

 The oddest thing I found was a ramp, clearly designed for a car to run up at speed so it could launch itself over a cliff. Flora walked up it and peered over the edge and decided it looked like a sure way to kill yourself in  blazing car wreck so she declined to do a solo Thelma and Louise and moved on.

I'm guessing it had something to do with the racing circuit that came with the update. Indeed, the whole of the extensive Duskwood highway system, which appears to be serving no-one and nothing, might be there just for the purpose of giving people somewhere new to race. It certainly seems a more realistic plan than setting up new courses in the city itself.

 And that was all I had time for, other than to jog through the woods to take a look at a tall steel pylon, which turned out to be frustratingly just beyond the limits of the explorable area. It immediately made me wonder if further expansion in that direction is planned because if not, why put the damn thing there at all?

All of that took place at night, as you can see from the pictures I took (The new "Hide UI" toggle, now available on F7, makes it so much easier to take quick snapshots.) so it's highly likely I missed something. I could have changed the time to make it daylight but I was so involved in what I was doing (You can call it immersed, if you must.) that I forgot it was an option. 

So far, I can't say I have a very clear idea what Duskwood is for. It's big and it's beautiful but what does it do? Then again, maybe it doesn't need to do anything. Maybe it just needs to be. 

Good advice for us all.  

She's One Smart Cookie

Is it still Creator Appreciation Week? I think it might be. Or if it isn't, it was on Friday, which was when I started this post.

I'm going to throw a little appreciation at Neverness To Everness but not to the whole team, much though they deserve it. I think it's already apparent how much I appreciate their work from all the highly complimentary posts I've been writing about the game since it started.

No, I'm going to be a little more specific, although by no means as specific as I'd like to be. I want to say how much I appreciate both whoever it is that writes the dialog for Zero aka The Appraiser aka Coco aka the Player Character aka Flora (In my case only, that last one.)

Gacha games are unusual in that they have a central character that's simultaneously very clearly the avatar of the player, in the way a character in an MMORPG would be, but also a scripted NPC in terms of the main storyline. PCs in MMORPGs can do pretty much whatever they like, central characters in RPGs have to operate within very specific parameters but gacha leads get to walk a middle path.

That puts them in a very awkward place when it comes to relatability. They can either go the Silent Protagonist route, all nods and eye rolls, or they can be fully scripted. Both choices have their attendant risks. Both risk alienating the player if the balancing trick doesn't come off.

I used to be very firmly in the Silent Protagonist camp. I felt quite strongly about my characters having words put in their mouth. I'd much rather only hear them talking in my imagination than have to listen to someone else getting it wrong out loud.

In a fully scripted RPG, it's only a problem if the writing or the voice acting is really bad. There, you know you aren't playing your own character. You're not really "playing" a character at all. You're just steering one around the screen. You're borrowing them. You don't own them. You're not them. They have their own agenda. Your job is to facilitate them in achieving their goals.

 

In an MMORPG, conversely, even if the character you're playing is given lines to speak, you're most likely going to ignore them. Your character is either yours or it's you, depending on perspective. The great majority of the time, you won't be interacting with NPCs in conversation anyway, nor choosing responses in cut scenes; you'll be killing monsters and chatting to your friends and guildmates.

Gacha open world rpgs, though, kind of straddle the fence. There's a strong, linear storyline that's going to take up a good deal of your time but there are also countless other activities in which you'll be either alone or with NPCs. A lot of those won't involve much talking but some will and the ones that do are likely to be the more interesting ones, like the ones where you get to hang out with your imaginary friends and just chat.

It gets even more confusing when the game uses the peculiar convention of the genre that sees you naming a character in Character Creation, only to find all the NPCs calling them something completely different. This is an annoying but supposedly necessary function of many voice-acted games, where clearly the voice actors can't magically enunciate the names of thousands and thousands of player-made characters so a generic substitute (Like "Commander" in Guild Wars 2.) has to to stand in for whatever the character calls themselves. 

I'm surprised, all the same, that with modern technology that can't be improved. Maybe that would be an acceptable use of in-game AI: to slot the player character's name, correctly enunciated, into pre-recorded dialog.

It already happens with text dialog, of course. Occasionally NPCs will even ask you what you'd like them to call you. And then sometimes they forget and call you something else anyway!

The whole thing is prone to both confusion and frustration. If you find yourself stuck playing a character who keeps saying things you can't imagine "your" character saying, it not only breaks immersion, it can break your relationship with your own character, too. It's probably even worse when you have to listen to "your" character talking in a voice that sounds absolutely nothing like the voice you hear in your head.

 

I'm extremely pleased to say that not only does none of that happen for me in Neverness To Everness but that everything that Flora says and everything about the way she says it rings completely true to her character, as I imagine it. 

The Appraiser, a job title I have come to like very much in the past few months, since it really does seem to describe what she does, maintains a deliciously dry, skeptical attitude to pretty much everything. She's never cynical or dismissive but neither does she take anything at face value. She's always alert for nuance and subtext and she can spot it lurking in the floweriest language. 

People do not easily fool The Appraiser. Appraisa  l isn't just her job; it's a core aspect of her personality. She can spot a scam or a con almost before it starts and she's ever alert for someone presenting themselves as something other than what they really are.

Some of this is expressed in the kind of mildly questioning response you might give to a friend who's telling a story you feel might be a little exaggerated. You can imagine her raising one eyebrow as she does it although I'm not sure NTE's animations quite run to that yet.

What really reveals the depth of her skepticism, though, are the internal monologues. The Appraiser frequently runs what someone has just said through her internal monitoring system and we get to hear her thoughts. That's when I sometimes laugh out loud.

All of that is in the writing. I don't know if the same person handles all the main character's dialog or whether duties vary but however it's done, so far it's been extremely consistent. I would absolutely love to be able to offer my appreciation to the individual writer or writers responsible but as is almost always the case, there's no direct accreditation. 

I just tried googling it and Gemini tells me "Specific individual writer credits for the player character's (the Appraiser / Esper Zero) dialogue in Neverness to Everness have not been publicly named by Hotta Studio". Exactly as I expected.

 

If I could make a single change to RPGs and MMORPGs it would be to add the writer's credits to the text that shows up in the quest journal. It would be so easy to do and it would allow players to follow writers in games just as they can in other media. If any game does it, though, I've never seen it.

It's a lot easier to find out the name of the voice actors who bring your favorite characters to life. I'm not sure why that should be, other than that writers tend to be bottom of the heap when it comes to respect in almost all collaborative media. If you want to be taken seriously as a writer, write books. At least there you get your name on the cover.

The voice artist for the female version of The Appraiser is Suzie Yeung and she does a superb job. She hits  just the right tone; confident and yet somehow still a little uncertain, friendly and caring, yet slightly reserved. She gets that "...erm... really? Are you sure about that?" skepticism down perfectly. There's no conflict whatever between Flora's voice as I hear it in my head and how it comes out of the speakers. Suzie Young is Flora now.

There is always a risk in getting attached to a particular vocal rendition of a character in an online game, as I saw - or rather heard - to my annoyance in GW2. Sometimes actors move on to other jobs or can't be booked for certain updates because of scheduling conflicts. Or the studio for some reason doesn't choose to keep using them. It's jarring when a character you're familiar with starts talking differently, especially when it's your character.

I hope that never happens to The Appraiser. Long may Suzie Yeung keep speaking for her. And long may whoever it is that's putting words in her mouth keep doing that, too! 

6-5 - Mint To Serve...

 Summer's here! No, wait, that's not right... summer's nearly over. But not in Hethereau!

It does seem odd, dropping a summer-themed update in late August, but then a lot of games do it. It seems even odder when you consider that the big Summer Break in virtually all the regions where these games are played is just about to come to an end in a couple of weeks, whereas the beach-themed content is likely to be with us for a month and a half, well into the start of the new school year.

Of course, it's not only kids or even college students who play these games but given the kind of events and activities that feature in many of them, it's hard not to believe that's the target audience. If it was intended to appeal to an older demographic, there'd be a lot more alcohol involved.

The new update for Neverness To Everness brings a bunch of seaside fun, as I mentioned in a post a week or so ago. What I didn't mention then, because I didn't know, is that the seaside resort where it all takes place is in a new part of the city. 

The district is called Duskmoor, which doesn't sound remotely like anywhere you'd go to eat ice-cream and stroll along the promenade. It's described as "a vast mountainous region north of the Miguel District" and they are not kidding. It's gigantic, although I suspect a lot of it is open country.

I'd be a bit more authoritative but I've only taken a quick look so far and that was on the laptop, in bed the other night, so I don't even have the few screenshots I took, near to hand. (And I'm too lazy to go into the bedroom, power up the laptop and mail them to myself...)

 

I didn't do anything while I was there anyway, other than run all the way to the Wertheimer Tower to register the teleport and get the region opened on my map, which was when it became immediately obvious just how big the place is. It's damn near as big as all the rest of the districts put together. I'm very much looking forward to exploring the whole thing.

But first there's a story to get through. I started it this morning although that wasn't my plan. What I was going to do was try out some of the new summer events and I did, for a while, starting with the volleyball because when I logged in the intro quest for it, Jade Star, was already up on my tracker. 

I have no idea why it was there. I must have been looking at it when I was on the laptop, I imagine, although I can't remember doing it. Anyway, Flora was in Duskwood, next to the Anomaly Tower, and the blue quest marker was pointing towards the beach half a kilometer away, so I just went with it. I was curious, anyway, to see how this volleyball thing was going to work.

I did wonder if it might be player vs player. It's very easy to forget, but NTE is a an online co-op title and it seems a four-person sport like beach volleyball would be a perfect fit for four-person co-op. 

It might be yet, for all I know, but that's not how the event starts out.

Sidebar: By a synchronicitous co-incidence, a very odd thing happened as I was running through Duskwood today. A window popped up on screen, asking me if I wanted to accept a request from someone called Jana to join me in my world. This is the first time anything like that's happened since I started playing the game. I had no idea it was even possible. Jana was waiting for a Yes or No but the whole thing took me completely by surprise and I just stared at the pop-up, not responding, trying to figure out what was happening, until the timer ran down and it vanished. Sorry, Jana.

After it was gone I rummaged around in the settings until I found the section that tells you who else is playing and allows you to set parameters on invites. You can have Private, Friends or Confirmation Required. I had no idea any of that was there until this morning. I considered setting it to Private but in the end, considering I've only had one in several months, I figured I might as well leave it as it was. Next time, if there ever is one, I might even accept a request, just to see what happens. It might be someone wanting to play volleyball...

The volleyball event starts with a conversation with someone going by the highly unlikely name of Uncle Loong. I know, thanks to playing the MMORPG Loong many years ago, that a loong is some kind of traditional Chinese dragon. Any time I meet an NPC in a game and they have a name like that, it makes me suspicious. 

I don't think "Uncle" Loong is a dragon in human form but you can never be sure. As to whose uncle he might be, your guess is as good as Flora's. He looks about twenty-two, though, so that makes me even more suspicious...

Whoever or whatever he is, he sets you up for a warm-up match so you can learn how the game is played and show him how good you are. You need a partner but luckily Mint volunteers so fast you don't even have time to finish asking her. 

She's there in a nanosecond, dressed for the part. I had actually been wondering if Flora was going to have to play beach volleyball dressed in her pant-suit. She looked bad enough trotting along the sand dressed that way, weaving between all the beachgoers in their bikinis and cut-offs. Luckily, once the game starts, Flora magically re-appeared, dressed in some suitable beach-wear I had no idea she owned. It's absolutely hideous but that's by-the-by.

The game itself has quite a few controls to master. I haven't yet mastered any of them. By the time I'd played two matches, I just about knew how to serve and that was it. 

The Warm-Up is the lowest possible level of difficulty and I still only won one of the two maches. The first was a close-run thing that Mint and Flora eventually won 9-7. You need to get to seven and then be two points clear for a victory.

 

In the second match we were doing much better. We served to open and I seemed to have gotten the hang of that to the extent that we were 6-1 up by the time we lost serve. Unfortunately, I very much had not gotten the hang of returning serve, so we lost our massive lead and ended up losing 8-6. 

At that point I felt like I'd probably had enough beach volleyball for the time being. It seemed like something I'd probably be able to get to be at least passable at, with practice, but I wasn't convinced I had the motivation. It is fun and it's beautifully animated. I could do without Mint apologizing every time she misses a shot but other than that I enjoyed it a fair bit.

I was very surprised to find, when I spoke to Uncle Loong again, that we'd somehow met with his satisfaction, despite only winning one match. The quest completed and immediately another replaced it, telling Flora she needed to go to Eibon right away. So she did.

That turned out to be the start of the new Main Story Quest. I spent the next hour and a half on it and it was excellent. But that's a tale for another post.