Go Directly To Blaugust. Do Not Collect 200 Gold Pieces

It's Blaugust tomorrow and I have nothing planned. I do have a few, vague ideas floating around but all of them would require annoying little things like research and planning and forethought and I just don't seem to be in the mood for any of that right now. I'm more in the mood for winging it so we'll see how far that gets me. 

I'm not worried about it. If I was, I wouldn't throw several perfectly reasonable topics into a Grab Bag the day before the event, now would I? Just be thankful I haven't held these back to spin up into whole posts of their own just to meet a quota.

Is Your MMO As Famous As RuneScape? 

Who hates Monopoly? No, not monopolies. This is a blog about gaming and popular culture, not politics. I mean Monopoly the incredibly tedious board game I used to play when I was ten but only if no-one would play anything better. 

I haven't played the damn thing in well over half a century but where I work, Monopoly occasionally blows up into some kind of a big deal because Waddingtons  (Showing my age there...) Hasbro keep pumping out special editions. The year they did one for the city where I live, we literally couldn't keep the things in stock.

I very strongly suspect the same will not happen with the latest Monopoly Special Edition: RuneScape.

Yes, hard to believe though it is, RuneScape is getting its own Monopoly board. How many video games can say that?  

Oh, yes, World of Warcraft, for sure. We had that one in. Didn't sell many.

I just looked it up. There are fifteen video game editions of the family fun-wrecking game, according to the Fandom wiki. How many can you name? 

Well, all of them, obviously, since I just put a screenshot of the lot next to this paragraph. But you could have guessed most of them, I bet. 

It doesn't look like it's purely sales-based, although huge sales are clearly a pre-requisite. It very much looks like the key factor is being a big franchise with a presence outside of gaming. More than half of the fifteen also have Hollywood movies or big TV shows based on them. 

All of which makes it doubly impressive RuneScape got in. Is your favorite MMORPG on there? Thought not. Ever wonder just how big a deal RuneScape really is? Here's a clue. It's in the same league as Pokemon, Sonic, Roblox and GTA5.

It's available for Pre-Order on the RuneScape store. The MMO Bomb piece says it's available from October but the store says delivery February 2027. Also, why is it rated 16+ on the box? Regular Monopoly is half that. What is there aboout RuneScape they're not telling us? 

It's Metal, Jim...  

If you didn't know William Shatner once made a very, very bad album of cover versions that included his crazed takes on the sixties staples like Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds and Mr. Tambourine Man, you'd better hand your nerd badge in at the desk on your way out. That's Popular Culture 101.

You may even know he's made a few more albums since then. He likes to keep up, even if he's often a decade behind. But did you know he fronts his own metal band? I didn't. Not until I read about it on Stereogum this week.  

Maybe be you did know already. It's not like it's a secret. As the piece points out, Stereogum itself reported back in February that the Shat was prepping a metal album. 

I missed that bombshell, somehow, but I'm doing my due diligence now and telling you about it because I'm sure you won't want to miss the opportunity to hear the 94 year-old cult actor (I nearly put actor in quotes then but that would be a cheap shot. I'm sure he must have acted in something, once.) give his unique interpretations of classics by Black Sabbath, Judas Priest and Iron Maiden.

And would you like to see him perform those songs live? I just bet you would. Well now you can! Or you will be able to at next year's Coachella, always assuming he's still up for it then. I mean, he'll be 95...

I know no-one reading this is going to be at Coachella 2027 but these days the whole thing is livestreamed. They wouldn't miss the opportunity to share something like this with the world, would they? We should arrange a listening party...

New Jeans For Old

Gasp as I segue effortlessly from gaming through geek culture to music. It's a veritable masterclass in grab-bagging. It also needs a lot of padding because as must be increasingly obvious I don't have a lot to say about any of this other than sharing the links. 

Seriously, we get all knotted up about people using AI to write blog posts but it's perfectly fine just to precis other people's stuff, throw in a few smart-alec remarks and call that original work, just so long as you don't forget to credit your sources to let everyone know where you stole it from. Is it something to do with the dignity of labor? Does hammering a keyboard add some protective veneer of authenticity or humanity?

Oh dear, he's off on one again. Someone bang him on the back of the head. That usually resets him.

One of the saddest music news stories of the past year or two was the doomed attempt of New Jeans to free themselves from the indentured servitude that is the Idol system. I am no expert in how it all works but you really don't have to be to see how desperately exploitative it all is. That many of the people being exploited have worked hard to get themselves into a position where someone wants to exploit them does nothing to excuse the process.

Not particularly unusually, New Jeans hit a point where they'd had enough but very unusually they tried to do something about it. It was a little like a scene in a horror movie for a while. You could watch them struggling to get free, almost making it to safety, then being seized by a tentacle at the last moment and dragged back under.

And now they've emerged again. Well, four of them have. One was lost, never to be seen again. Eaten by the monster. As yet we haven't had any new music but no doubt it's coming, which poses an awkward moral question over whether to engage with it or not.

New Jeans were my favorite K-Pop band before all this happened, not that it was a competitive field. I guess it's best to hope it all goes well after all they put themselves through but I'm not sure whether I want the New New Jeans to pick up where they left off, making excellent music and uplifting, super-happy videos, or if it wouldn't be easier all round if the new stuff wasn't up to much and they all looked glum singing it. 

Luckily, I don't have any say in it so I'll just take what I get. And probably feel slightly uncomfortable if I enjoy it. But then, I know that feeling... 

At which point I really should move straight into some mildly embarrassing music choice. I'm sure I can find one. Give me a moment...

I Want You (And I Want Him Too) - New Weirdos

Oh, I think that'll do it! In so many ways...

Say Anything? Challenge Accepted!

I have a few ideas for full-length posts floating around but I don't feel like going deep on a warm Saturday afternoon so I guess it's Grab Bag time again. Saturday Selection I could call it, if I had no shame at all. Or no standards, for that matter. 

Usually, when I do one of these things, I have a few ideas bookmarked but not this time so I'm just going to have to wing it. What's the minimum number of sections for a Grab Bag anyway? Got to be at least three, doesn't it? And in my case a song to end, like the old vaudeville performer I have apparently become.

There's an interesting beginning. I'm a couple of years shy of seventy now, terrifying though that is, but even that advanced age puts me well shy of any age you'd need to be to have experienced Vaudeville. Hell, my mother, who was 93 when she died earlier this year, was too young for Vaudeville. Wikipedia dates it from the 1870s to the 1930s. 

Added to that, it was distanced from me by space as well as time. Vaudeville was a purely North American phenomenon. Over here we had Music Hall as our nearest equivalent. Music Hall flourished from "the early Victorian era until around World War I" (Wikipedia again. This is why I occasionally give them money when they come begging. Without Wikipedia, I'd have to do some secondary research. Or get an AI Agent; which, screw that!)

So how and why do I even know what either of them is? 

There's some excuse, or at least an explanation, for Music Hall. When I was growing up I had to suffer through the interminable tedium of a TV show called "The Good Old Days" (To which I will not link. You can thank me later.) in which much the same bunch of comedians and singers that did the rounds of all the variety shows back then (And there were far too many of them - performers and shows both.) got themselves dolled up in nineteenth-century drag to drone their way through the kind of material that got stage door johnnies hot under the Eton collar, back when Marie Lloyd or Vesta Tilley flashed an ankle.

O. M. G. ! Just look at that last sentence!  Why in the name of sanity do I know what a "stage door johnny" was or what they wore? Or who Marie Lloyd or Vesta Tilley were? How does this stuff get into your head in the first place and why doesn't fall out again, seconds later? I can't remember 90% of anything I actually want to remember and yet apparently I can trot this stuff out without blinking.

Before someone chips in to correct me on Vesta Tilley, she's there to both prove and disprove my point. I did easily remember her name and she was a massively popular Music Hall star but she wouldn't have been flashing her ankles because she was a male impersonator. I had to google her to check what she was famous for and it was that. 

I heard a whole program about her on the radio once and yet I only remembered who she was and when and where she performed, not what she did, which was the important part. Shows how superficial this knowledge is, much of the time.

As for Vaudeville, my knowledge pretty much starts and ends with the Marx Brothers. I love the Marx Brothers but then who doesn't? I was introduced to them at an early age, when they may even all still have been alive (I'd have to check the dates.) although none were still performing. 

My mother was a big fan and I grew up watching their movies, not only on television, whenever they came on but at the cinema. The Marx Brothers became swept up somehow by the counter-culture as did a whole slew of icons of the past (Viz. Peter Blake's cover for Sgt. Pepper.) and their movies were shown surprisingly often in art-house cinemas when I was still at school. They were also a staple of the college film societies when I was at Cambridge at the end of the seventies and beginning of the eighties.

How the hell did I get started on this in the first place? Oh yes, I remember. (I don't. I had to go back and read the beginning of the post to remind myself...) I was saying how a grab bag post had to be three items minimum plus a song at the end, although that last bit's just me. 

Hmm. I'm nine paragraphs in now (Actually thirteen after the edit...) That's six hundred and fifty words. (Seven-eighty now...) Is it worth getting back to the original Grab Bag?  I could just carry on riffing on Vaudeville, I guess, but I don't know anything about it or indeed have anything I want to say. Still, when has that ever stopped me?

It occurs to me this is one of those post I sometimes do for Blaugust, when we hit Advice Week or whatever we're calling it that year. Are we doing those this time? The themed weeks? I didn't see anything about it in the opening posts but I'm not sure we've had the full agenda yet.

Based on the last couple of years, though, I don't feel qualified to offer advice to would-be bloggers any more, even though I've been doing this for a decade and a half and I've written well over three and a half thousand posts now. Blogs in the third decade of the twenty-first century don't look much like the blogs I learned from before I started, let alone like this one. 

In a way, they tend to look more like, well, web-logs. It's like regression to the meaningless. 

Rather than long-form posts on specific subjects, topics or activities, most of the newer blogs I still read, the ones I picked up from Blaugusts past, are day-to-day diaries or sets of notes or quick thoughts on this and that. My go-to advice on sitting down and typing to see what comes out, then calling it a post, looks a bit redundant these days. That's what everyone seems to be doing already.

And why not? It's bloody easy, isn't it? Yesterday's Palworld post took me all day, on and off. Probably at least four hours altogether. And here we are today, almost a thousand words done (More than a thousand, post-edit.) and how long has it taken me? About half an hour so far. 

And I can keep this up all day. I'm not kidding. It's the easiest thing in the world, just tapping away at a keyboard, letting your thoughts flow onto the page, lightly editing as you go along and giving the whole thing a final pass at the end. If you ever get stuck for something to say, just say anything.

Ooh! Now I want to watch Say Anything, the 'eighties movie starring John Cusack and Ione Skye. You know it! It's the one where he stands on the lawn under his girlfriend's bedroom window, holding a ghetto blaster over his head. Iconic image. I'm going to grab it and stick it in here later. (Or, in fact, use it as the header.)

That's not my favorite part of the movie, though. My favorite part is where he has dinner with his girlfriend's family and when her father asks him what he's going to do with his life he says "Kickboxing. Sport of the future!". (Except he doesn't, as I'll explain later. It's just another misremembering.)

I used to quote that a lot, often à propos of nothing. Kickboxing! Sport of the future! I'd say. Just like that, out of nowhere. I'd like to say I've stopped doing it but I'd be lying.

It's curious I can remember that quote and those scenes (Albeit in a mistakenly composite fashion, it turns out...) but I have no idea what song was playing on the ghetto blaster. I'm sure it would have been significant. I'm pretty sure it was some awful power ballad. Probably Huey Lewis and the News or Phil Collins or something equally unbearable. 

Oh, you know I'm going to have to look it up now. I was going to embed the clip anyway. 

Hah! It's Peter bloody Gabriel!  I guess that's a step up from the drummer of his old band, at least. Still a horrible song, though, but then Lloyd Dobler isn't exactly Mr Sophisticated. That's kind of the point.

As for the scene where he actually says "Kickboxing. Sport of the future." it's weirdly hard to find online. It's not, as I always misremember, the dinner party scene although everyone else seems to think it is, too. The quote is used numerous times as the title or in the description of clips on YouTube but then the clip is almost always the dinner party scene, where he doesn't say it at all. 

That one does include the superb speech, where Lloyd explains what he won't be doing for a living:

 " I don't want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don't want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don't want to do that."

If you haven't seen that one, do yourself a favor but the only clip I can find on YouTube of the actual scene where he says the key phrase, which is when he comes to pick Diane up for a date, has almost inaudible sound. I might have to find my copy and upload the damn thing myself... 

The key moment is in the trailer above, though.

I said earlier I was too young to have any excuse for knowing literally anything about Vaudeville or Music Hall but I'm also too old to have a deep emotional attachment to teen movies from the 'eighties, aren't I? Say Anything came out in 1989, when I was 31. And I doubt I saw it until the early 'nineties anyway. 

I must be emotionally unstable anyway, I guess, (Quiet at the back!) One of the reasons I haven't rewatched a lot of those 'eighties classics for the longest time is that I get too emotionally involved. Pretty in Pink, Fresh Horses, The Sure Thing, Some Kind of Wonderful... I want to watch them all again but do I want to put myself through the trauma? I'm just going to have steel myself and buy some tissues.

The only one I have re-watched in recent years is Ferris Bueller's Day Off. I think we have about four copies in the house, in different formats. We kept re-buying it for a while. It's a lighter watch, on the surface at least, although not once you stop to think about it. Plus it's the gift that never stops giving. Always something new. 

I have plans to start re-watching and re-reading a lot of stuff once I officially retire. Not that I'll have that much more free time. It's more of an existential decision. Much though I love new things, I'm starting to think I might have overdone the neology just a tad in recent years. The past has its place, too. And not just as somewhere to run to for comfort. There are always new things to find there. 

If I follow though, and I think I will, expect more posts like this, only much more focused and coherent. Not that it would be possible to be much less focused and coherent. Although I could give it a shot if you like...

And with that, I think I'm going to stop. Absolutely not the post I thought I was going to write, although I guess it's kind of a grab bag in its way. A grab bag of memories and associations. 

Didn't I say I was going to end with a song? I think that's how all this started. And it's not going to be Peter Gabriel, I'll tell you that for nothing! 

Modernism - Perennial

Weirdly appropriate, wouldn't you say? 

Also, 2000 words, ninety minutes, including the edit and an hour off for tea but not counting the digression into exactly when Lloyd Dobler talks about the sport of the future. That's how to do it! 

Old Rock Stars And Their Funny Little Ways

I'm having a bit of a lazy day today but I don't want to skip posting altogether, so let's have a half-assed musical grab bag! First and second up, two very odd news stories about possibly the two most famous rock stars on the planet. 

I mean, yes, obviously that's a contentious claim to make about anyone but if you can't claim something like that about Dylan and the Beatles... 

Oh, alright then, how about the two most famous octogenarian rock stars? Anyone going to fight me on that? 

Fab Macca Wacky Paul "Thumbs Aloft" McCartney Banned From Reddit 

When I say the Beatles, obviously I mean one of them. Well, two, kind of. As will be revealed, Ringo was there, too. But no-one would claim Ringo Starr was one of the most famous rock stars in the world, would they? Not even when he was in the sodding Beatles. He's just Ringo ffs!

Paul McCartney, though. He still has power. Although not enough to keep the moderators at Reddit from banning him, apparently. Here's how it supposedly happened.  

Macca played an "intimate" gig yesterday in front of an audience that defies belief. So much so, I'm going to copy/paste the highlights of the guest list, as reported by Stereogum:

"Taylor Swift, Olivia Rodrigo, Sabrina Carpenter, Billie Eilish, Tate McRae, Christina Aguilera, Steven Tyler, Anthony Kiedis, John Mayer, Renee Rapp, Finneas, Nat Wolff, Harrison Ford, Calista Flockart, Reese Witherspoon, Laura Dern, Jason Bateman, Jon Hamm, Owen Wilson, Steve Carrell, Joey King, Emma Watson, Jake Shane..."

Oh yeah, Ringo was there, too. 

That's a list of people so famous there is literally just the one name I don't recognize, Jake Shane. What's even more amazing is I don't just know the names, I know who every last one of them is and what they're famous for. (Okay, okay. You got me. Not Nat Wolff... although I swear I have heard the name. I just don't remember where or when.) 

I'm surprised all these people are allowed to be in the same place at the same time. Isn't there some kind of insurance thing, where they have to go to gigs in groups of no more than three? Like how heirs to the throne have to travel on separate planes?  It's just as well there wasn't a fire. We'd have needed a whole new zeitgeist.

Unsurprisingly, given the audience, it was a no phones show. No phones means no pictures. 

Wasn't it nice, then, for Paul to post some pictures of the gig on his personal subReddit? Video, too. What a generous and thoughtful chap he is! 

Someone at Reddit didn't seem to think so.  Not long after the links appeared, Paul's  account got banned. I can hear him, in my mind, yelling "Don't they know who I am?" He's not quite as cuddly as he looks, you know.

His account has been restored but the pictures and video haven't. Maybe he'll put them on YouTube instead.

Hi. I'm Bob Dylan. Can you spare $5?

Bob Dylan is a Nobel Prizewinner. For literature, no less. His writing has value. And that value is five dollars a month.

Bob started a Patreon because of course he did. Why wouldn't he? He's Bob Fricken' Dylan!  He can do what he likes! He always has. 

Seriously, when did anything Bob Dylan did ever make any sense? Have you read Tarantula? Has anyone? (Clearly no-one on the Nobel Committee...)

Even so, this one takes some beating. Patreon is that platform people use when no-one in whatever business they wish they were in thinks their stuff is worth paying them for, isn't it? The idea is it lets you bypass the regular distribution channels (I.E. the professional ones.) and go straight to the audience. With a begging bowl.

OK, cheap shot. Patreon is a good option for all sorts of perfectly bona fide projects in the same way Kickstarter is, even if some people abuse it. We do tend to give the side-eye to established companies launching Kickstarters, though, so if a semi-billionaire (He's worth $500m, supposedly.) with a guaranteed pipeline to mainstream publishers starts a Patreon for his fiction and charges $5 a month for it, is that abusing the platform? Or the audience? Or is it just Bob being Bob? 

Whatever it is, that's what he's done. And what does your five dollars get you? 

"Audio Essays" about figures from American history, read out loud by AI, according to some reports. And "Letters Never Sent", which is a series with one entry so far, that being a note from Mark Twain to Rudolf Valentino. That widely-used expression "You couldn't make it up" somehow just doesn't seem strong enough, does it?

There are also going to be short stories. Bob's posted one already. It's called Bull Rider and it "tells the story of a man who seeks out a Texan rodeo to try bull riding." It's credited to Marty Lombard, who may or may not be Bob writing under a pen name.

Just for the hell of it, he's also thrown in a video of Mahalia Jackson because why not? If you want to give Bob five dollars, which I can't imagine why you would not, here's where to send your money.

And now for a couple of covers. The first is odd. Not Bob Dylan on Patreon odd or Macca banned from Reddit odd but still... odd.

 Goodbye Horses - Kevin Abstract

Kevin Abstract used to be in Brockhampton, about whom I know very little. Goodbye Horses is "that song from Silence of the Lambs" as I put it back in January of last year, which is selling it very short indeed. It's a song people like to cover. 

There are at least three versions of it on this blog already, although the one in the post I linked has been taken down from YouTube due to "a copyright claim by Leslie Mentel".No clue what that's about. The two versions in this post are still up, though.

Kevin Abstract chose it for TripleJ's Like A Version segment. He also chose to do it with a string quartet, while reading some of the lyrics off his phone. Not the choruses, though. Why he chose to do it that way may be explained in the inevitable "Go Behind" video that always accompanies the cover. Or it may not.

It's actually a really good cover but then it's a bombproof choice.

 

 Age of Consent - Lime Garden (New Order Cover)

A couple of weeks ago I'd never heard of Lime Garden. Now I have two of their songs cued up for a post and then there's this fantastic cover. Just feel the bass on that!

In fact, as it happens, one of the songs I have backfiled to share is the second one they do in this video, Downtown Lover. I guess I could have edited it out but that would have meant doing some work and I'm really not up for any of that today, as must be obvious by now. Not when it's so much easier to crib ideas off someone else.

But, hey! At least I did the re-writes myself. I could have gotten an AI to do it. If it's good enough for Bob... (Ok, I did get AI to do the Macca pic at the top.)

 

AI Used In This Post

Just that header image. It was that or steal someone's copyrighted photos so... lesser of two evils?

It was done in five seconds using QWEN Image SD at NightCafe with the relevant headline as the prompt. Then I used the Ink Sketch filter in Paint.Net to rough it up and called it done. I did say I was feeling lazy. 

We're Going To Need A Smaller Bag

It's Friday! The traditional day of the Grab Bag. Or the music post. 

As it so happens, though, I don't have much in the bag to grab right now. Or in the music archives.

I would have loved to do a What I've been Listening To but I haven't really listened to anything much other than myself. I had a look at what I've bookmarked and it would be thin gruel so I'll have to leave it to thicken up a little. 

Still, I imagine I'll come up with something if I just keep writing...

Every Month Starts On A Thursday 

I was moaning the other day about Prime Gaming not sending out blog posts/emails/press releases about the new free games for the month and then this morning I woke up this morning and there it was.

It transpires there's a very simple reason for Prime not informing members of the new games at the start of the month. For them, the month always begins on Thursday. 

One thing I seem never to have taken on board since Prime stopped dropping the entire slate on the first of the month is that now things change weekly, the new tranche always drops on Thursdays. That means the whole thing is disconnected from the monthly calendar, so why they even bother bringing  the name of the month into it at all beats me.

Anyway, there's a schedule of new games for the next four weeks and when I've had time to go through it I imagine I'll cobble together some kind of post about them. It's always an easy one to put together and I enjoy doing it, not least because it gives me one of the few opportunities I'm happy to take to snark about games. Mostly I stick to writing about games I like these days but I think Amazon is big enough to take a few pokes.

Gamify Everything!

I'm very much enjoying playing in Wilhelm's Fantasy Critic league, currently in its inaugural year. The game gamifies game development or rather game production and one of the games I picked was Date Everything!, a game which gamifies dating apps. 

It did quite well for me but I  haven't played Date Everything and I have no intention of ever playing it. You don't, fortunately, have to play the games you pick for the league. That would be an entirely different game, gamified in an entirely different way. 

I also haven't tried the new app I read about at Gameindustry.biz recently but that isn't going to stop me writing about it, either. It's called Ludocene and it describes itself as a "dating app for games".  

What it does is gamify the process of choosing new games to play by aping the tropes of dating apps, which themselves gamify the process of finding a partner, which was what Date Everything was parodying. Is this getting self-referential enough for you yet?  

Apparently, Ludocene specifically uses the conventions of deck-builders to build a deck of recommended games based on game cards you choose or reject. I'm not entirely sure who needs all of that to choose a new game to play but now it's there if you want it. I'm kinda-sorta tempted to try it but maybe I'll wait until Blaugust is over and I have some time on my hands, not just to mess around with the app but to play whatever it suggests I've bonded with .

Looking Good, Reading Fine

Ah, Blaugust! The one-hundred-and-fifty-headed hydra of our times! Seriously, did you realise there are now just shy of 150 blogs signed up to Blaugust 2025? I didn't. I hadn't checked since the day after the event began, at which point there were 114.

Naithin (Yes, him again!) posted a full list of them today and the count at that time was 146. I'm betting on it topping the 150 mark by the end of August. [Edit: I just went to get the link for the full list and it's already up to 159 so I just won that bet...]

I left a long comment on that thread, which I do not intend to rehash here, except to ask again whether there's anyone out there who would genuinely like to read more than four and a half thousand blog posts this August, which is what would happen if everyone on the list successfully met the 31 posts in a month challenge on which the event was originally conceived. 

I am instead going to do what I said I was going to do yesteday, namely respond to another of Naithin's posts, specifically the one on making a blog look really good without using pictures. 

It ties in to something I have in mind to write about, which is the way blogs tend to fail in comparison with the photocopied zines they have arguably replaced. I had reason to look at a load of my old apa-zines from the nineties this week and I was almost embarassed by how much more effort had clearly gone into producing them than ever goes into one of my blog posts now.

See Footnote

I used to mess about with typography and layout all the time. I certainly did use a lot of illustrations, mostly cut out from magazines and cinema programs, photocopied from books and comics or just found in the street. Other people went further and attached physical objects to their zines or pasted their photocopied text onto pieces of wood.

This blog is one of the more heavily-illustrated in this quadrant of the blogosphere and I do take a lot of time and trouble over the pictures and their placement but it's absolutely trivial compared to the effort I used to make when everything was analog and tactile. And one thing I hardly ever do here is mess with the typography.

As Naithin points out, doing that can make a big difference to readability but I have to say that when I was doing it with a photocopier back in the nineties, making things more readable was the last thing on my mind. I used to deliberately make things hard to read, not so much in terms of literary style, although there was plenty of that, too, but literally difficult to make out the words.

And I wasn't the only one at it, either. Looking back at the zines we all round-robined to each other, it's plain a lot of people didn't have accessibility or user-friendliness at the top of their agenda. Or on the agenda at all.

I don't propose to go back to making everything I write as awkward to read as possible but I do think Naithin is right in that some extra thought and imagination when laying out a post wouldn't be such a bad idea. And in the spirit of Blaugust, here are a few links to blogs I read this morning that do just that:

ribo zone - font that looks like typescript, no capitalization, halftone images 

axxuy - actual typescript from an actual typewriter

Small Good Things - very well laid-out, wide, clear, excellent sub-headings, really inviting the reader in 

I also note that all of the above use a soft, pastel background color that feels really... comfortable. Color is another tool I rarely take out of the box.

At this point I was going to go on to discuss syntax, grammar and language in general but I think that's a topic for another post. I'm going to leave it there for now because I have other things to do. Those one hundred and fifty Blaugust blogs aren't going to read themselves! 

In Keeping With Tradition

We'll end with a song. I said I didn't have many bookmarked but I didn't say I didn't have any.

Motel 6 - Tiger la Flor

I'll see your Motel 6 and raise you Super8. I need to get an album by Tiger... Nothing on CD yet, sadly.

Probably no post tomorrow because work but it's Blaugust so who knows?

 

Footnote: That's a photo taken with my phone of the first page of a zine I did for the apa back in the mid-nineties. It's a fragment of a story, the full text of which you can read, clearly, here, along with the other fragment that makes up the whole thing. I also have a seven song sequence now that goes with the pair of them, which I will make public at some point because I'm very pleased with it and I would like people to be able to read the story and listen to the music together.

Back then, though, I really didn't care about an audience. In fact, I wanted to make people work for it if they were going to engage with anything I did at all. My attitude was neatly summed up in a reply I made in print to someone who'd not been appreciative of something I'd written: "Don't do me any favors. I couldn't care less whether you read any of my zines, to be honest. If you don't enjoy them, don't bother." We told it like it was, back then!

It's hard to see in the picture but the whole zine consists of the full text, white on very faded grey, blown up to the width of the A4 page and laid out with no line breaks, capitalization or punctuation, overlaid in the center with the same text in a tiny point size in a narrow, double line-spaced column. 

I was plainly more interested in what the text looked like than what it said - and I was really proud of what it said. Proud enough to want to share but not too bothered about being understood, apparently...

 

Notes on AI used in this post: Just the header image, which is from a series I'm doing that will appear here one day. It was generated at NightCafe using Ideogram V3 Turbo, from the prompt "Walking through corn fields Covered in dust Lost in this dustbowl young female figure, old, worn clothing, line art, color, retro-futurism", which is partially taken from the Port Silo story.

Blurring The Boundaries

Friday. Traditional day of the Grab Bag. I have a few ideas. Mostly game-related, too. Let's see what's in there...

First up, a couple of news stories about the positive influence of gaming. I know, right? We ought to be past that by now. But are we? 

Video Games Are Bad Good For You 

The new trend seems to be people who are already famous for something, testifying about how gaming in general, or a specific game in particular, helped them to do what they do and/or become who they are, by which, of course, I mean who we know them as. Who they actually are is and will always remain a mystery.

The two celebrities, if I may use that catch-all, are Bella Ramsey and Taylor Fritz. I vaguely knew Bella Ramsey's name but I couldn't have told you where from. Taylor Fritz I'd never heard of, although I bet my 92 year-old mother has. 

In case you're as clueless as me, Ramsey is an actor who's appeared in Game of Thrones and The Last of Us, among other things. Two shows I probably should have watched but haven't and most likely never will. Fritz is a tennis player, good enough to have made the semi-finals at Wimbledon this summer, hence my mother's undoubted knowledge of his existence. In fact, according to the article, he's ranked #5 in the world.

Pirate Penguins. Possibly.

Their gaming-related... I nearly said "confessions" there, which would have been telling, but I guess they're more like affirmations.... their gaming-related stories - let's go with that - involve exploring gender identity in Bella's case and... erm... being about as good at League of Legends as he is at tennis in Taylor's.

Honestly, neither of those revelations should be remotely surprising and they really aren't presented that way, either. We do seem to be past the time when famous people playing video games was, in itself, worthy of comment. At least now it has to be relevant in some way to what we hear about them in other contexts, to provide supporting evidence of their journey in some way.

The interesting parts of both stories for me were the specifics not the generalities. I thought it felt quite significant that Bella Ramsey explored her gender identity while playing Club Penguin. Not so much because she had one that she felt needed exploring but because of the venue she chose for her explorations. 

I'm fairly confident that wasn't what Disney had in mind when they bought the game for $350m in 2007. They also owned Toon Town, another child-focused MMORPG at that time and I'm almost certain I've read another account of someone famous exploring their gender identity there, although I can't remember who that might have been. Please append notes and sources in the comments if you do.

It does make a very good case for the anonymity and fluidity of these games for children and young teens. Free Realms is another one where stories like this come up quite not infrequently. Maybe John "Smed" Smedley should have thought a bit more about the social and cultural benefits before shuttering the much-loved MMORPG, rather than complaining how hard it was to wring money out of kids.

The part of Taylor Fritz's tale that caught my attention wasn't that he was really, really good at LoL. He's a world-class sportsman. You could predict that. No, it was that he made a point of explaining he didn't, as you might imagine, play League of Legends to relax or wind down or get away from the challenges and tensions of international tennis. 

On the contrary, he pointed out that playing LoL at the level he does (Emerald.) is "very mentally taxing and mentally draining" and requires his full attention and engagement. It makes a convincing case for eSports being taken seriously, when one of the world's top sportspeople says playing a video game requires as much from him as his real-world sport. Okay, as much mentally. But still...

I Am, But What Am I?

Following on from Bella Ramsey's gender explorations in Club Penguin, I thought I'd link to one of last year's Blaugust newcomers, Cynni of Cynni's Blog. We had a lot of new bloggers join last year and I put most of them either in my Feedly or on the blog roll but over the months since then I gradually unsubscribed from nearly all of them. I already spend altogether too long every day reading blog posts. It just wasn't feasible to keep up with all of them.

The ones on the blog roll, though, I didn't remove and I still actively keep up with a few, even if I don't read every post. Cynni, in common with a disturbing number of bloggers I follow, seems to have been having a pretty bad time of things lately but she always has a good perspective on life and I found her post on gender identity very informative and thought-provoking. 

I also just finished a very good book by Griffin Hansbury that made me think even more. The book is called Some Strange Music Draws Me In, a lyric from Patti Smith's Dancing Barefoot, and it's a coming-of-age novel about a trans man. Er... boy... er... well, it's complicated, isn't it? Language, I mean. And gender. 

Read the book, that's all I'm saying. I learned some things.

I find myself thinking about this stuff a lot nowadays. Partly that's because it's in the culture in a big way now but mostly it's because I keep wondering what it would have been like to have grown up in a culture where those concepts were more fluid than they were when I was doing it. 

Tenses are complicated, too, aren't they? Yes, I do wonder what it's like for people who are growing up in that social and cultural environment today but mostly I find myself idly transposing the times, imagining how things would have been, had it been that way then, when I was in school and college, not how it would be for me if I was in school or college now. There is a difference.

I am old and I'm not about to change who I've always been or perhaps more accurately who I've always thought I've always been, although the sheer range of descriptive genders I encountered, many for the first time (Well, the first time in print. I'm sure I've met many inhabiters of said genders in life without realizing.) both the post and the book do offer plenty of options, smoe of which do resonate with me, at least to some degree. For now, though, my pronouns remain he/him and I don't foresee making a shift from the gender identity I've always accepted. 

But of course it's a lot more complicated than that. Again. Isn't it always? As I think about it, there have been  so many times I haven't conformed all that closely to the labels I've been wearing, so many behaviors I've exhibited and choices I've made that don't exactly fit the shape those labels describe. It's very apparent that we're not all just one thing even if some of us definitely are.

And it's not like I didn't recognize and talk about it back then, either. What we now call gender identity was a fairly common topic of discussion in some of my social groups in the eighties and nineties. We just didn't have the language to express the shades and nuances that are all up in the culture now. Mostly we used to get drunk and speculate about our friends, who speculated about us, when we weren't around. Pretty sure that's not well-thought of these days.

I wish we had talked more about our own identities rather than trying to figure out other peoples'. I'm not saying it would have led to different choices but it might have. It would almost certainly have affected my understanding of who I was and who I could be. Probably, I would have ended up much the same but I wouldn't claim it as a certainty. 

It would have been better to have had the language to talk about it, anyway. In the end, it's always about the language, isn't it? Everything is.

I have a few more solid discussion topics along these lines stashed away but I'm saving them for Blaugust so instead I'll just slide into a couple of snippets that kinda-sorta relate to things I've mentioned earlier in the post.

Now That's A Weird Name

Reaper Actual, I mean. It is, though, isn't it?  Is it a quote? A reference? A pun? Does it mean something or is just supposed to sound cool? And if so, does it?

Whatever it's doing, it's the latest attempt by the aforementioned John Smed Smedly to get back into the gaming industry. As a player, that is. 

No, wait, that's not helping... I don't mean he wants to play some video games. I'm sure he does that in the evenings and on weekends already. I wonder what his League of Legends rank is?

No, I meant get into it as a player like in the Robert Altman movie, The Player, by which I don't mean to suggest Smed's going to start producing movies or ending up killing anyone... well, not anyone real. He's certainly going to end up killing a lot of virtual people because he's all about the PvP and his new project is... 

... well, I'm not sure what it is, other than it's called Reaper Actual, which not only tells you nothing but doesn't even really suggest anything, other than perhaps some kind of homicidal accountant. No, hang on... I'm thinking of an actuary there, aren't I?

MassivelyOP, the only place I've seen it reported so far, don't seem to know what sort of game it is, either. They stop short of labeling it an extraction shooter, merely noting it has "extraction shooter gameplay".  They aren't really all that interested in speculating about what other sort of gameplay it might have because they're far too busy boiling the tar and plucking the chickens. 

Reaper Actual is going to be on the blockchain. Wave the red flags. I must say I thought we were over the blockhain now. And Web 3.0. And Crypto (Although not Krypto. We're definitely all over Krypto, not over him. See? Language again...) I thought AI had eaten all of their lunches and now we were consolidating all our techno-fears in one, handy package.

Anyway, I'd say I'll be interested to see what Smed comes up with this time but I'd just be lying. I'm not interested in anything he does except out of habit. Blockchain or not, I won't be playing it. I just wish he'd retire, really, although as I'm finding out, that's not aways the choice you make, even when it's an option.

And finally...

Google Blinks, Meta Casts Shade

Ye gods, that's a convoluted sub-heading. Let me unpack it. 

Remember Google Glass? It was a long time ago, wasn't it? Just as a quick refresh, it was a project Google was big on for five minutes that involved a pair of glasses with built-in video cameras and internet connectivity. 

It got the same treatment every other new tech gets these days, namely scorn, derision, fear and hatred and Google limply caved to popular pressure (Or internet bullying, to give it its other name.) almost immediately, dropping plans to develop it for the mass market in 2015 and pretending it had never happened. 

They didn't actually stop development, though. They re-marketed it as a specialist product and it was quietly adopted for certain market sectors. There were still versions available commercially as recently as two years ago, although the project is now officially and finally dead.

Since then, other companies have produced similar devices and no-one seems to have noticed or cared. Privacy doesn't seem to be quite the buzzword it was back in the twenty-teens, does it? And now Mark Zuckerberg is getting in on the act. 

I found out about this in a very odd way. My mother is officially registered as partially-sighted, meaning gets information sent to her from various sources, telling her about services and prodcts that may be helpful. She got a flyer in the mail from one of the government-sponsored organizations that handles visual impairment, inviting her to go to the local library for a hands-on with some new glasses you could get that would read things like bus timetable or bottle labels out loud for you when you looked at them.

We've had stuff about these things before but they usually run to several thousand pounds a pair and you can't just walk in and try them on anywhere, so it seemed like a good opportunity to see if they'd justify that kind of investment. 

My mother went to the library, gave them a go, didn't think she'd get on with them, and that would have been the end of it, except she brought back the leaflet she's been given and it had the actual name of the device, which hadn't been on the original flyer, so I googled it. Ironically, as it turned out. 

The Meta Wayfarer Sunglasses are made, as the name suggests, by Meta in co-operation with RayBan, (Hence "shade" in the sub-heading. I know. Painful, isn't it?). The concept looks a lot like Google Glass to me. 

It has a built-in video camera and uses AI for instant translation, among other things. You can livestream from your glasses to Facebook and Instagram. It uses your smartphone for the internet connectivity but apart from that it seems to do everything everyone said would mean the end of civilization if Google Glass caught on. It's also about a tenth of the price I was expecting so I imagine take-up could be high. 

Of course, they have the advantage of looking exactly like RayBans, which means instead of throwing rocks at you in the street if they see you wearing them, they're more likely to be calling out "Cool shades, bro!". By comparison, Google Glass made you look about as obvious as if you'd hung a sign around your neck saying "Caution: Filming In Progress". 

Ten years too early and wearing the wrong clothes. Poor old Google, eh? Probably should get out of the lab more. Still, maybe it's time Zuckerberg caught a break. That VR thing didn't go so well, did it? 

And that's all I have today although not all I have. More when there's a free slot.

Final thought... just imagine how much better this post would have looked if I'd used AI illustrations. Didn't even think of it until I was about to hit publish. That tells a story all its own... 

Trending Now...

For various unexpected reasons, I had to spend much of yesterday driving Mrs Bhagpuss around the Cotswolds (Not exactly a hardship on a beautiful summer's day but time-consuming all the same.) and much of today putting together a self-assembly chest of drawers (Chest finished, drawers still a work in progress.) Consequently, I no longer have time to write the post I was planning for today.

Luckily, I have a couple of game-related musical items that shouldn't take too long to stitch together into some kind of a patchwork. Plus I expect I might find something else to bulk things out a bit.

First up, Death Stranding 2, sequel to a critical darling I have never played. I could, though. The Director's Cut of the original game is currently available for free to Prime subscribers on Amazon's cloud gaming platform, Luna. I probably ought to try it. Everyone says it's a must-play.

That's not why I'm writing about it, although one of the two posts I was thinking about doing today was going to be about the Prime Gaming games I picked up earlier in the week. No, this is about the London leg of Kojima Productions "World Strand Tour",  a twelve-stop affair in which Hideo Kojima trucks around the globe promoting the new game with live events featuring various special guests.

For the London event the guests were Caroline Polachek and Chvrches, which is some double-bill alright. Caroline performed her song "On The Beach" from the new game and Chvrches did the title track to the first game, which they wrote. There is some shaky phone footage of both, which you can see at this link if you really want to, but I think we'd better have something a bit tidier, one of which is from a different event entirely...

I ought to say, I don't really much like either of those. The Chvrches one is a decent song but not really my kind of thing and other has very little in it of what I usually enjoy in Caroline Polachek's work, namely dance rhythms and beats. This is my problem with most game music in a nutshell, really. It exists for a very specific purpose and without that context it rarely makes much sense. Or not to me, anyway.

That problem doesn't really affect this next one because what Pickle Darling has done is take the music they've made and turned it into game music for a game they've also made. The result is good music, a good game and some game music that frankly I didn't really pay much attention to, although it was fine in the background while I was playing. I'm not a big 8-bit fan though.

Here's one of the songs in its original context.

Massive Everything - Pickle Darling

And here's a screenshot from the game, which you can play at itch.io here. No download required.

It's a pretty good game, too. It only takes about fifteen minutes to play and I laughed several times so that's a good ratio. Also the controls are comfortable, even though J seems like a really odd choice for Interact.

Let's have one more from Pickle before we go.

Human Bean Instruction Manual 

And finally, just because it seems to be badly-filmed, hard-to-listen-to video day, here's an absolute dream of a guest artist/cover that you can barely hear. Lana del Rey is on a stadium tour just now, which sounds like a fan-fic fantasy until you realise it's actually happening.

Last night she played Wembley Stadium and she brought out Addison Rae for couple of songs. They dueted on Lana's as-yet unreleased 57.5 and on Addison's brealthrough hit from last year, Diet Pepsi. 

There's really so much to say about that. As many of them have gone on to acknowledge, Lana changed the rules for female singers in pop music and her influence is absolutely everywhere now. When I fell in love with her songwriting, pretty much no-one sounded like her; now almost everyone does. 

Addison Rae certainly owes her a debt, which may have something to do with both the way her debut album Addison is stirring up a chorus of "Well, I wasn't expecting much but... it's really kinda good...?" reviews and with how big-sisterly Lana is with her. Not to mention why Lana rates Diet Pepsi so highly.

My favorite version of the song is still Blondshell's by a mile but I'd love to hear a studio take from Lana. Or a properly recorded and sound-balanced live version. Do people even do live albums any more?

Of course, bringing out your idols and/or accolytes to duet with you seems to be a big trend just now. It has to be a very special combination to get much attention any more.

Just Like Heaven 

 Olivia Rodrigo and Robert Smith

That'd do it. 

I'd just like to point out that Robert Smith is barely six months younger than me...

Let's Play Grab Bag Catch-Up

I know it's Wednesday but here's a grab-bag anyway. Why should Fridays have all the fun? All these have been around before but there may have been... developments.

A Stone Rolls Up A Hill...  

Let's start with... I want to say a rant but it's more of a whine. Regular readers may (But almost certainly won't.) remember that three weeks ago I dinged 51 in the EverQuest II version of Overseer and immediately posted to complain about how freaking slow it was going. I said then that it had taken me the best part of three months to get there from the mid-40s and that getting to a new season just meant I had to start from scratch all over again.

Well, guess what? Here we are, three weeks later and how far have I got? Not quite halfway through Level 52, that's how far. Impressed? I'm bloody well not!

Getting through 51 was a pain. Since it was a new Season, I was back to just two blue missions, which meant having to log in several times a day to recycle them. Slowly - oh so slowly - I managed to scrape up enough missions to fill out my allotted ten per diem but as I got a few yellow ones, with longer timers and cooldowns, I still had to set them several times a day to maximize my chances of getting more yellow ones.

Eventually - and it seemed like a lot longer than three weeks - I scraped up enough yellow missions that I could justify setting all ten once a day. That doesn't mean I have ten yellows now.  That's the dream. No, I have seven and I'm willing to sacrifice three daily slots to blues just so I can log in after breakfast to set and forget.

Well, not forget, because if I did that, the next morning when I logged in I'd have all the missions completed but they'd go on cooldown for several hours as soon as I collected the rewards. I have to remember to set them in the morning and pick them up in the evening now, so they come off cooldown overnight, ready to go again first thing next day. As for purple and green missions... not seen a single one drop yet.

This is not "playing a game". This is, at best, admin. I don't hate it because stuff like this does at least give some structure to my days, which otherwise might start to feel a little untethered. That's always a danger when you (Semi-)retire. Still, it's hardly what you'd call fun.

As I also think I said last time, I'm unclear on exactly how far I have to go to catch up to where I should be in Overseer. Accurate information is harder to come by than it should be. There is an achievement for hitting 55, though, and another for 61, the latter of which states "Become a Level 61 Overseer to unlock season 7", so I assume I need another nine-and-a-half levels.

Based on how long it took to do the last ten, if I keep this up without missing a day I don't think I can count on being Level 61 by the time the freaking expansion comes out! I always wondered why one of the higher-cost packs included the current Overseer Season as a perk. Not any more!

None of this really causes a problem if you play EQII the way people used to play MMORPGs, by which I mean all the time and obsessively, as though it was a vocation, a job and a religious belief all rolled into one. With that mindset, daily Overseer missions become just one more thing to do on a never-ending list. 

It's comforting, in a way, the repetition, which I guess is why people accept it or even welcome it. Certainly saves you having to think of anything else to do. For a game that you're playing casually, though, it makes no sense whatsoever. So why am I doing it?

I guess at some level I must enjoy it. Probably best not to think about it too hard.

Don't You Know Who I Am?

I was simultaneously excited and annoyed yesterday to read the news over at MMOBomb that Neverness To Everness is about to go into closed beta. Excited because NTE is by some margin my most hotly anticipated new game right now. Annoyed because I signed up for testing at the first opportunity and so far I've never heard a word.

That sounds awfully entitled, doesn't it? Why should he think he's going to get an invite? Millions of people sign up for these things. What makes him think he's so special?

Yeah, not that. What annoys me isn't that I haven't gotten into any round of testing so far, it's that I've never had a single communication from Hotta, the company making the game, at all. And that's odd. 

Usually, as soon as you sign up for testing, the company behind whatever it is starts to deluge you with promos and news and offers and more sign-ups. The whole reason they offer the places in testing in the first place is to harvest contact details so they can do exactly that. Or so I always thought. 

Either I'm wrong or this game's being made by people who think differentl. Or - and this is what really bothers me - my sign-ups never made it through the process at all and I'm not even registered as an potential source of future income.

I said "sign-ups" plural there. You might have spotted it. That's because I already had this worry last time they opened some kind of test. I suspected then that I might already have signed up but I tried again just in case. It didn't entirely seem to work but it wouldn't let me try again so I left it at that. Didn't have much choice, really, other than to sign up under different contact details, something I know from experience would almost certainly come back to bite me in the backside later on.

That's still a possible course of action I might take. Not that there's any real point to any of it, of course. It's a F2P game that I definitely wouldn't put much time into during a testing phase anyway, and it's most likely under NDA so I couldn't even blog about it. So why do I care? 

Because I want to play the damn thing! That's why! Even just for a few hours, to satisfy my curiosity and scratch this irritating itch.  It's nice to have at least one game I'm actually excited about and it's frustrating to feel locked out, even from the publicity cycle.

You know what? I might just go and sign up again after I finish this. It's not like I'm short of email addresses I could use.

There Can Only Be One... More

People, and I'm one of them, often complain about how there are far too many streaming services these days and how it costs a fortune if you subscribe to all the ones that have something you want to see. My solution, again like a lot of people, from what I hear, has been to drop some of the ones I had been subbing and watch less, rather than to spend even more money adding more.

I put Netflix on Pause last month for a start. I've barely been watching anything since I started making AI music, which is what I do late every evening in the time-slot I used to reserve for watching shows. (Also in the morning and in the afternoon but let's not go there just now.). 

I checked with Mrs. Bhagpuss if she was watching anything on Netflix at the moment and she wasn't so it seemed like we were paying to not watch anything on Netflix, which I figured we could probably do for free. A few weeks before that I cancelled Disney+ for the very good reason that we both agreed it was a big disappointment. Everything there I want to watch I've already watched even before it was on the service and the originals and exclusives aren't exciting enough to get me to watch them before I get to a whole load of unwatched shows and movies on services I already have or don't have to pay for.

In place of the two losses there was one addition. Amazon Prime had an excellent offer on Apple+, £3.99 a month for three months. I took that and even with the music pushing everything else aside I have actually used it. I'm watching Murderbot and catching up on Mythic Quest. In fact, those two make up 100% of my viewing right now. 

With all that in mind, what would it take me to subscribe to another streaming service? Obviously I'll unpause Netflix at some point, most likely when either Stranger Things or Wednesday arrive, but a completely new one?

This.   This will do it. I will, without hesitation, subscribe to Hulu if that's what it takes to watch the Buffy reboot when it happens. If Neverness To Everness is my most hotly-anticipated video game, this is its televisual equivalent.  

Want to know the best thing Sarah Michelle Gellar says in that interview? It's not that everyone, dead or alive, will feature in the reboot (If she has her way.). That's fantastic and I'm one hundred per cent behind it but there's something even better than that to look forward to: 

“It will be lighter than the last few seasons of the original”

Thank-you! Thank you so much! I've been wanting to do a full rewatch of Buffy for a long time but for once it hasn't been finding the time that's been the problem. It's that I can't summon up the willpower to put myself through all that trauma again. 

If there's a longer, bleaker run in a supposedly upbeat, humorous, popular fantasy series I don't really care to know about it. (And nobody better mention Bojack Horseman.) When I was watching Buffy the first time, there were days when I didn't want to hit Play. Even when I really, really wanted to hit Play just to find out what happened next..

I'm not saying I'd like to go back to the Monster of the Week slapstick of the first couple of seasons but damn! There has to be some acceptable mid-point. 

Okay, it looks like I've gone on so long about not very much I've taken all my allotted time and space. Which is great! Now I can go have lunch! 

The Taste Test 

Let's end with a song, like the comedians did, back in the really-not-that-good-after-all old days.

A little while back, Blondshell did an exclusive cover for in-car streaming service Sirius XMU and some kind soul put it up on YouTube. I featured that version here but it cut off just before the end. Checking back to the post (Which just so happens to be the same one I already linked above.) it's also now "Blocked in your country on copyright grounds".

Fortunately, Sirius XMU have officially released official version so I have absolutely no hesitation in sharing it again. Let's hope that's not blocked too. I can't actually tell until I post it.

What's more, the cover is now a highlight of Sabrina's live set, as must be obvious from the audience reaction in the next clip. For an artist of her prominence, she sure does still play some small clubs, doesn't she?

She's playing a club like that in the next city over from where I live in a few months and tickets are still available. I'm thinking about it. Haven't been to a club gig in twenty-five years or so. It was already feeling a little odd when I was in my early 40s so it'd be very weird now. 

Of course, it'd be fine if I wanted to see all the same bands I saw back when I was young - everyone who does that is old, onstage and off. Maybe I should do that a few times, just to get back into the rhythm of things before I try seeing anyone I actually want to see. It certainly wouldn't be because I wanted to see any of those old duffers again...

What's Hotta And What's Notta

Going to be a short one today (Famous last words...) because I don't have time for a long one and I haven't bookmarked much for the Grab Bag that this is going to have to be. Oh well, onwards and outwards or whatever it is...

Wotta Hotta

Did you know the studio behind the best-named game we're likely to see for a very long whle also has a great name? I didn't until yesterday, when I read this at MassivelyOP. 

The game, of course, is Neverness To Everness, which might just be my favorite game name ever. The studio is called Hotta, which is a very good, memorable name although for once not as good as the game they're making. Have you ever noticed how studios tend to give themselves much better names than they give to their games?

The news is that both beta sign-ups and pre-registrations are open for everyone. The closed beta is global and so is the game, thank heaven. 

I signed up and pre-registered immediately. Literally immediately. I went straight from the MOP page to the website and did the thing. I was that excited.

Only problem was, I couldn't tell if it worked. It was a super-simple process, just an email address and a confirmation code to paste back in. I was expecting a questionnaire and there was the briefest flash of a question about where I was located in the world but it shot off the screen in a micro-second and the whole thing ended, saying it was done. I tried resubmitting my details just in case something had gone wrong but I got told I'd done it already

And that was that. Since then, nothing. I'm used to getting a welcome email right after signing up but not here. It is possible, now I come to think of it, that Hotta already had my details. This may not be the first time I've tried to register my interest. 

Not that I actually want to beta test the thing anyway, you understand. I just want to plaaaaaaaay.

Sorry, I sounded about thirteen then. Still, nice to be excited about a game for once.

Crossover Artist

I don't get too many opportunities to cross the streams between gaming and music here. I am not much of a fan of music in games. No matter how good it sounds when I'm playing, it's very, very rare for anything I hear in a game to sound anything other than just okay at best if listened to on its own. 

Music is famously effective at bringing back memories, so listening to game music on its own can make me remember the fun I had when I played but that's a side-effect at best. The problem as far as I'm concerned is that the very great majority of all music made for games is instrumental and I hardly ever listen to instrumental music by choice. And if I did, it very definitely wouldn't be the kind of cod-classical, orchestral scores that burble along in the background of most games I play.

The shortcomings of game music, though, is a topic for a different post. One I probably should have written before this, now I come to think of it. I'll have to add it to the list.

This isn't about that, it's about a very odd news item that popped up in the NME the other day. I haven't seen it come up anywhere else so I thought I'd share.

Apparently, Caroline Polachek, the much plaudited, hard-to-pigeonhole solo artist and ex-lead singer of  cult favorites Chairlift, has written a song specifically for the sequel to the much-plaudited but never played by me game, Death Stranding. 

In fact, she's doing the title number. It's called "On The Beach". 

The game is called "Death Stranding 2: On The Beach", which is a weird title if you ask me. I can't hear "On The Beach" without thinking of the ultra-depressing, why not just kill yourself, Neville Shute novel. Apparently Death Stranding auteur Hideo Kojima is "a big fan" of Caroline's and the pair of them got into some kind of mutual appreciation thing online that ended up with her asking him if she could write something for the sequel and him saying hell yeah!

The Death Stranding franchise, in contrast, has Caroline Polachek, Chvrches and Woodkid and maybe Nine Inch Nails and Bring Me The Horizon, too. I constantly see comments on YouTube threads for every kind of indie obscurity, thanking the likes of FIFA and GTA for introducing them to some tiny act they'd never have heard of otherwise. I'm clearly playing the wrong games when it comes to music. 

As I said, just about every game I play has faceless instrumental music behind it, some of which works wonderfully to enhance the gameplay or the narrative but none of which I ever think of for a second after I log out. Mostly it's because I play a lot of MMORPGs, I guess. The gameplay there is so endless and endlessly repetitive it demands music that can be ignored. 

I think the only MMO I've played that has real music from out in the world inside it is Once Human and I absolutely love it there. Clearly it can be done. I can see how contemporary sounds might not fit a high-medieval setting but there's no excuse for modern-day or science fiction MMOs. Come to think of it, The Secret World has that record store...

Yeah, I really ought to think about doing a whole post on this. I mean, I just drafted it ...

And that's it for game news. Since we're on the subject of music already anyway, though, I guess I'll just throw out a couple of good tunes and call this done.

 

 

Free Association - Friendship

Now, this is the sort of thing I could imagine in the background of an MMORPG. It could easily be looped to play indefinitely. That's a compliment, by the way. People do that nowadays to songs they really like.

I'd do it to this one. It's from their upcoming album with the great title "Caveman Wakes Up", which I thought was the name of the song until I wrote this post. I dunno if there is a song on the album called Caveman Wakes Up. I hope so.

Cloud Without Tear - R. Missing

Only went up on YouTube eight hours ago so don't try and tell me you heard it already. I think my aunt used to have a sofa like that.

 Diet Pepsi - Blondshell

I wouldn't hang about with this one. Listen to it right now. I've been waiting a week for it and I'm going to have to figure out some way of downloading it before it disappears because I wouldn't count on it staying on YouTube long. Thanks a million to Sonny Graham for uploading it (All the comments are people thanking him.)

What it is is a cover Blondshell did for the weird in-car-only radio station SiriusXM. I had to look up what that was and I still don't really get it. That's get it as in understand it. Get it as in get to hear it... not a chance in hell.

I'm hoping it'll eventually come out in some format I can acquire legally. It's a great song and she's killing it. Shame it cuts off before the end but at least there's what there is.

And finally, since we just had my second-favorite current artist (No prizes for guessing #1), why not have the second runner-up too?

 Devotion - Sunday (1994)

They have a new EP out of the same name. Every track is genius. Her lyrics especially. She's a wonderful writer.

I just bought the first album on CD. I had to go to an independent online record store for it because even though it's a major label release (AristaRCA) it's not on Amazon. I mean, the album itself is - I could listen to it on Amazon Music or buy the MP3 download but the CD? Nope. What's that about?

Modern music distribution is at one and the same time incredible and abysmal. I can get anything for nothing any time but try to buy something to keep and it's a duck shoot. Oh well, I did get it, eventually, so I'm happy. I guess I'll have to make do with a download of the EP though...