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... 

Survive Or Die (Then Do It All Over Again)

The last couple of posts were quite substantial so I guess it'll be okay if I scrabble up a grab-bag today, even though it's not Friday. If not, tough. It's going to have to be. That's all I've got.

Will The (Dire) Wolf Survive?

(Maybe. Next Question.)

Here's an odd one. Who knew Dire Wolves were real? Well, I did but I'd forgotten, so it was a bit of a surprise when I read they were coming back. 

The NME, which bizarrely enough is where I saw the news, seems to have jumped on it because of the Game of Thrones connection. The headline blares "Dire wolves from ‘Game Of Thrones’ have been brought back from extinction", which does seem to suggest a lack of journalistic rigor in a number of directions. The claim is dubious and anyway it's not like George invented the creatures, after all, or even that he has a unique claim on them from his fiction.

The author of the piece, Max Pilley, does attempt to justify the assignation by saying the long-lost species "re-entered the popular imagination in recent times thanks to George R.R. Martin selecting the animals as the sigil for the Stark family in his epic fantasy series", which is fair enough except that it ignores the previous few decades, when dire wolves were being stuffed into pretty much every generic fantasy epic and every D&D-inspired role-playing game out there. They're about as over-used a trope as dragons or orcs.

Speaking of orcs, for an orc chieftain, a dire wolf has to be the canine equivalent of a blood-dripping skull daubed in blood on your shield, doesn't it? You pretty much have to turn up to clan gathering mounted on the back of a Dire Wolf or who's going to take you seriously?

I couldn't begin to count the number of Dire Wolves I've killed in a whole bunch of MMORPGs, where they're generally encountered about one step on from the Holy Trinity of starter animals, bears, boars and regular wolves. Name recognition meant I was initially quite excited to hear the extinct species was being revived through the magiscience of genetic engineering but the scientific reality, as usual, turns out to be less thrilling than the headlines. 

On deeper examination, it turns out the extremely cute, fluffy puppies aren't true Dire Wolves at all but mere hybrids, the result of a combination of "DNA from a 13,000-year-old tooth and a 72,000-year-old skull" and "20 edits of the genetic code of the gray wolf, the species’ closest living relative".

The resultant embryos were then brought to term by "domestic dog mothers", as reported by the BBC, whose journalistic standards are, of necessity as well as by tradition, considerably more rigorous than those of the New Musical Express. The resultant animals aren't purebred dire wolves, more like genetically modified grey wolves with white fur and larger skulls.

And much greater marketing potential, of course. Let's not forget that.

Still, I look forward to seeing what the mad scientists do with the Tasmanian tiger, the next extinct superstar animal on their short but highly evocative list, which includes mastodons and dodos. If they're taking suggestions, I've always wanted to see a Giant Sloth, a creature from the past that features surprisingly rarely in fantasy but which always seemed to turn up in the dinosaur books I read as a child: "As tall as a giraffe and much heavier than a Grizzly Bear". That'd give even a dire wolf pause, I should think, although it might look a tad less impressive on a shield. 

Will The Survival Game Survive? 

(Are You Kidding Me? Next Question.)

Two new survival titles caught my eye this week. I realize I don't need any more but they're hard to resist. They're like the M&Ms of the online gaming world; they look so deliciously different in all their different colors, even though you know they all taste exactly the same. And you just can't stop yourself grabbing another handful.

These two come in similar shades of cute. The first, already available on Steam, is called Squirreled Away and I'm guessing that tells you just about everything you need to know about it but if not, here's the trailer.

There's a free demo, which I'm downloading as I type this, so there may be a whole post about the game here one day. I suspect the demo will be about as much as I need (Or can take.) of being a squirrel so if there is it'll likely be the only one.

The other game looks like it might have longer legs (Than a squirrel? Not difficult...) but it's not coming until 2026. It's called Tomo Endless Blue, which sounds like something you'd see on a paint chart or possibly in the 2pm slot on the opening Friday of a minor music festival. Depending which source you believe it's either a "survival MMO" or "a Monster-Taming ARPG set in a Voxel Open World."

Whatever it is, it's probably going to have Nintendo's lawyers checking their precedents. Given Palworld's problems, presumably the developers, Onibi, will at least have the wit to steer clear of anything round, hand-held and throwable.

Then again, maybe not... 

Will My Patience Survive

(Too Late! Next Question.)

Speaking of festivals, I never did get around to listening to the eighty or so acts on the Glastonbury Festival Emerging Talent Contest long-list. Too late now. 

I did, however, waste half an hour of my life listening to the official playlist, showcasing the submitted song from each of the eight finalists. It was grim.

The only ones I could say I liked - and "like" would be pushing it - would be Sarah Meth's Steps and Westside Cowboy's I've Never Met Anyone I Thought I Could Love. The other half-dozen I either barely noticed or actively disliked.

Luckily, there's no Glastonbury next year so I'm saved the embarrassment of claiming this is the last time I'll bother with the ETC, knowing, even as I say it, that I won't be able to resist at least taking a look at the damn thing.

Will My Channel Survive?

(Hell If I Know. No More Questions.)

Finally, and since we're on the subject of music anyway, here's something I very much do like. I came upon it in a mildly curious way that might be worth reporting. 

One of the many pieces of advice I took on board when setting up my new YouTube channel was that you should never just start one from scratch and immediately begin uploading. Do that and YT's algorithm will assume you're a bot and ignore you.

What you're supposed to do is use the channel like a normal person for a while so it builds up a viewing history that makes the algorithm feel loved and wanted. Consequently, these last few weeks I've all but ignored the channel I've been using for well over a decade in favor of the one I made last month.

To get things started, I subscribed to a few channels I already follow. Both of my channels belong to the same Google account but it seems YouTube doesn't care about that. It doesn't make any "helpful" observations like "You already follow this channel" when you add one you've been following for years, anyway. It just does as it's told, which makes a nice change.

Because they were the first I thought of, I added Lana del Rey, Polly Scattergood and Sunday (1994), all of which, it has to be said, bear some superficial similarities. This had an immediate and intriguing effect on the kind of recommendations I was getting.

Instead of the usual mish-mash (Itself admittedly far better-targeted now than it was a year or two ago.) I found myself being pointed almost exclusively towards very new uploads by solo, female artists or female-fronted bands, all of them in broadly alt-pop range of sub-genres. Quite a few of them looked worth investigating so I clicked through several and that seemed to start a kind of snowball effect with more being offered up for my attention all the time. 

From the many possibilities I've heard quite a few I've liked but so far only one I've liked enough to add to my subs, the oddly named R. Missing, who immediately leapfrogged the competition by the simple expedient of including the keyword "Pony" in the title of one of her songs.

Pony Yeah - R. Missing

More incontrovertible evidence for my theory that any song or band with a name that includes the word "Pony" is more likely than not  to be worth your time and attention. At this point, I don't even think it's a theory any more; it's clearly a proven fact.

I listened to a lot more of R. Missing's enigmatic electronica and I liked all I heard. This, I think, is the best of them but that's just as well. When you discover a  new artist, you always want their current work to be their best. It suggests there's more great work to come. If all the best stuff was from four years ago, it wouldn't inspire much confidence in what's coming next, would it?

I'm sure she'll be turning up in future posts. As for my own, new channel, none of the advice on how to get noticed seems to have made the least difference. But that's material for another post and another day.

Scooby Gang X Drain Gang

Another Friday, another grab-bag, helped by a couple of interesting tidbits that came in late yesterday's news. Plus I have actually listened to some music that isn't my own for a change, so there'll be some of that, too.

We've Got Some Work To Do Now

First up, the best entertainment news of the year so far. As per the NME, there's a Scooby-Doo live action series coming to Netflix. Or you can have it straight from the Great Dane's mouth, so to speak.

There have been a lot of Scooby-Doos. "Three theatrical films, and more than a dozen animated series" according to Netflix, which isn't even counting the numerous, long-running comic-book series, the novelizations, the games, the toys... It's a major franchise.

Still, even the most ardent Scooby Gang buff would have to own that most of them haven't been all that. And yet, news of another always stirs... something. The heart? The imagination? Not sure exactly what, but I was more excited when I read the headline than seemed reasonable. 

And that was before I even noticed the really exciting part: "Produced by Greg Berlanti".

Greg Berlanti is the guiding hand behind a whole raft of TV shows, chief among them, from my persepctive at least, Riverdale and The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina plus pretty much the whole of the DCTVU, including Supergirl and Titans, all of which I very much enjoyed. He and his production company seem like both the obvious and the perfect drivers for the Mystery Machine.

Berlanti is producing but the Showrunners are Josh Appelbaum and Scott Rosenberg, whose credits include the much-maligned live-action Cowboy Bebop. I liked that one a lot more than the critics or the installed fanbase so that's not a warning flag for me, although I guess it may be for some. 

Granted, the lived show wasn't anything like as subtle or nuanced as its source material but the anime was "hailed as one of the best animated television series of all time". Scooby-Doo is well-loved but I don't think it can claim the same aesthetic status and as I suggested earlier, the bar for revamps is already set pretty low. I'm confident this one will clear it with room to spare.

There's no release date yet. I'm not even sure if they're shooting. It was reportedly "in production" in 2024 but who knows what that means?  Whenever it comes, I'll be there for it.

Let's have a break for a song, shall we? And for a change it's one everyone's going to recognize.

 Ashes To Ashes - Magdelana Bay (Original David Bowie)

 Magdalena Bay are critics' darlings just now, or they were last year at least, and they richly deserve it. Triple-J churns out an endless stream of covers, by no means all of them memorable or worthy of their originals but it's a high-profile promo slot for artists and some people really get competitive about it so there are some standout performances. 

This is top of the range. It starts out sounding a little flat (As in unemotional, not off-key.) but when Mica Tenenbaum starts to sing... oh boy. She really works her way into every corner of Bowie's peculiar phrasing. 

As Mathew Lewin, the other member of the duo, observed, "It’s a great kind of weird, experimental pop song". They haven't made it feel any less weird but I guess forty-five years have smoothed away some of the odder angles.

Even so, it still sounds weird. Imagine what it sounded like in 1980!

Oh No! He's Back!

Some people may count this as good news. I don't think I would. It is news, though, provided you're inside a certain bubble, which everyone reading this either is or has been at one time.

Yes, John "Smed" Smedly has returned. Whether his latest venture will bear any more fruit than the last two remains to be seen. Certainly, the precedents aren't encouraging. 

The much-hyped "Hero's Song" was cancelled before it got a full release, although Smed did get some credit for giving all the money back. As for his six-year stint with Amazon Games... anyone remember what he did there? I don't.

He left Amazon in 2023 and since then he's been quiet but it seems he hasn't been idle. He's back, alongside another name you might remember from Sony Online Entertainment, Matt Higby. Higby was Creative Director for Planetside 2, a game I think I played twice. Maybe three times. He also worked on pretty much every other SOE game at one time or another. His full credits include EverQuest, EverQuest II, Free Realms and Clone Wars.

The two of them have been cooking up something from pretty much the moment Smedley quit Amazon so I imagine he went straight from the one to the other. These people never seem to take a day off. 

As to what they've been working on, no-one's saying, yet. MassivelyOP are speculating it could be some kind of military shooter, based on what's showing on a couple of monitors in the background of the publicity shots. If so, it's of little interest to me and anyway I imagine, whatever it is, it's years from being something any of us will play. 

More More More - The Molotovs

A little less than a year ago, I did a whole post about the Molotovs, which seems like an odd thing to have done, in retrospect. I think it was the raw energy that got my attention. That and the covers they were doing at the time.

They did have a couple of originals even then and now here they are with their first, official single, a self-penned number called More, More, More, demonstrating that you don't always have to cover other peoples' material to be a covers band. 

Honestly, if this sounded any more like the Jam... well, there's no good way to end that sentence because it would be impossible for anything to sound more like the Jam than this does without actually being the Jam. I bet it sounds more like the Jam than Bruce Foxton and Rick Buckler's From The Jam ever did, and they were the Jam!

Whether sounding exactly like a specific band from the late 'seventies makes any kind of sound, commercial sense is up for debate. I think the retro needle has swung well into the 'nineties now, maybe even the 'aughts. 

Then again, Britpop was built on a foundation firmly laid down in the 'sixties and the Jam were mining tthe same sources for all they were worth, back in the 'seventies, so I guess it's all there and thereabouts the same thing, seen from space. 

It is endlessly fascinating to me that these sounds can just go on and on, fascinating and attracting people of a certain age. It's as if something happens to the brain in mid-adolescence, making neurons fire every time there's a valve amp with the gain turned up, a guitar with too much treble and and a barking voice that sounds like it ought to be flogging china down the market.

I like it, anyway. I mean, I've heard it a million times but I can always hear some more. Some More. More More even.

Less, Less, Less

That's what I'm asking for. I can't face another ninety hopefuls all in one go. Yes, it's the Glastonbury Festival Emerging Talent Longlist again. 

There's a playlist if you can face it. It's over two hours long. I haven't even started on it yet and I'm thinking this year maybe I won't. The returns seem to get slimmer every year.

I scanned the full list, which was surprisingly hard to find, to see if there was anyone on there I'd heard of. Usually there are a few. This year the only name I recognized was Dirty Blonde and I don't much like them. Too rawk for my refined tastes. They are good, though.

Given they were the opening act on the Big Top stage at last year's Isle of Wight Festival, it would seem they're also overqualified. I'm sure the publicity will be welcome all the same but it's a bit like those established acts who enter Eurovision, only to come 23rd. More risk than perhaps the reward could ever have been worth for them. I mean, the big payoff from the ETC is £5k and a slot on one of the main stages. Dirty Blonde might have been in line for one of those anyway. A 2pm slot when no-one is paying attention, sure, but still... 

I don't have anything left but music now so if you're not into digging the new scene I'll bid you goodbye. For the few that remain...

The Wolf - Witch Post

You know those songs that go on too long? Yes, I know. It's most of them. Well, this isn't one. I could have this on a loop for hours. Maybe I'll make one and post it to YouTube. People do that. I'm learning all sorts about making videos and content just now. I could branch out.

Also, it's one of those songs you just can't hear loud enough. And the video is great, too. Really, it's got everything. I wasn't quite as keen on their first single but the last one was good and this is way better again. All the videos are good, too. They could be something, maybe.

I think that's about it. Oh, alright then. One more, since you ask so nicely. Would you like Yung Lean being shot full of arrows or would you rather have Sept hanging out with their girlfriends? Difficult choice, I know. Let's have both, then.

It's always both, isn't it?

Babyface Maniacs - Yung Lean

Remember when Yung Lean was off the radar of anyone under twenty? And Drain Gang sounded like it was probably something from an Anthony Burgess novel? Yeah, well, those days are long gone.

All the critics call Yung Lean a rapper but I'm not sure that's what he's doing here. Or anywhere, really. Then, why would I know? Whatever he's doing, he's not doing it for me. I like it all the same.

Braces - Sept

The song goes back to 2022 but the video is brand-new. It's a real mood piece, the song. The video is more of a vibe. I'm not one hundred per cent convinced they go together.

The lyrics, all of them, run like this:

I said I liked you, I said I missed you
Never forget you, said I won't let you
I did it wrong
And now I cannot believe

Just like my braces
You're caught between my teeth
Like

You're in a hurry, I'm cold cut
Say not to worry, I love you, but
I didn't know
How could you see me so clean?

You hate yourself
But you don't know what that means
Like...

 

I dunno. They look like they're all having a much better time in the video than that would suggest. 

I could listen to that one a loop, too. I really ought to look into how to make those. Like I need another project right now...