When They Talk About The Meta, I Don't Think This Is What They Mean...

I'm finding it increasingly awkward to come up with ideas for game-related posts when I'm really playing just the one game. Yes, still that one, Played Time now just nudging into three figures according to Steam and still very obviously nowhere even close the end. 

One odd thing I notice as a blogger is that if this was a new MMORPG I was playing, it would feel completely legitimate, not to say expected, for me to post a dozen or more times in excruciating detail about the gameplay. I've done it countless times with any number of MMOs, the great majority of which I've ended up playing for considerably less than a hundred hours and I've rarely thought to ask myself if anyone really cares, let alone whether it's a reasonable use of my time.

With single-player games, though, it feels like the way to go is maybe one or two posts at the start, just to announce what game it is I'm playing and what sort of a first impression it's giving, then nothing more until I've finished and it's time for a full review. It's an approach that works well for most of the single-player games I actually finish, nearly all of which are likely to be point&click adventures or narrative-driven games of some kind and which, crucially, are unlikely to take more than ten or fifteen hours, tops.

Survival games and the currently vogueish action-rpgs like Wuthering Waves, even if they're not multiplayer or I'm not playing them as such, slew much more to the MMORPG end of the spectrum. They frequently feel like MMOs even when they aren't, which makes it very easy to write about them as though they were.

Really, ridiculously big single-player RPGs like Baldur's Gate 3, though, (And I'm not sure there are all that many others...) don't fit into any box. It would be very easy for me to do whole posts on what the characters look like, on the dress-up options (Not least that there are some.) on inventory management, on the combat, the stats, the skill trees... all the standard topics I'd fall into talking about out of habit if I was obsessed by a new MMORPG.

Only, doing the same for Baldur's Gate 3 feels at best self-indulgent but mostly just pointless. Who even cares? The game's two years old and developers, Larian, have made it extremely plain they're done with it, want no more to do with it, won't be making any more content for it and are more than happy to move on from it. Sometimes I get the impression they wish they'd never gotten involved with it in the first place. 

With an MMORPG or any live service game that's still getting updates, commenting on how the game looks and plays feels like a conversation. With an RPG that's final and complete, talking about it feels more like hearing an old recording playing in an empty room.

But what's the alternative?  Hah! I'm so glad you asked! I can tell you that!

 

Since BG3 is still literally the only game I'm playing, as far as gaming goes I could post about:

• Games I'm Not Playing But Might If/When I Ever Get To The End Of This Bloody Monster
• Games I Used To Play Long, Long Ago
• Games I'm Looking Forward To Playing If/When Someone Gets Off Their Backside And Finishes Them
• Things Going On In Gaming In General

Or I could post about non-gaming topics. I always do plenty of that. Except, just now, I'm really only playing this one game, reading the usual random selection of books and slowly working my forward through the Dr. Who Archive on the BBC iPlayer. I'm not listening to enough new music to put a solid playlist together or watching enough new TV shows for a full post about anything. (I did watch the second episode of Haunted Hotel last night. That was good...)

Does anyone really care what I think now about the Dr. Who seasons I last watched when I was in my teens, though? That's how far I've got so far. There's really a shit-ton of Dr. Who, isn't there? I never really appreciated the sheer voloume of the franchise before. 

I do have things to say about the show but again it seems like the world has probably had to put up with more than enough old men droning on about the things they thought were so great when they were young already, especially if the only conclusions they come to is that those things were pretty great after all.

Most of this is happening because I have so much annoying, difficult real-life stuff going on at the moment, not helped in the slightest by Mrs Bhagpuss and I both suffering form a nasty and persistent cold-like bug that makes getting any of it done a real challenge. It means all I really want to do with my free time is as little as possible. 

BG3 is a drug, basically, and so is old, familiar television and, for that matter, the kind of books I've been reading lately. (I might argue all reading is a drug-like experience but that would require me to put a coherent argument together which, as must be obvious from this post, is not something I'm up to doing just at the moment.)

It's not that there aren't things to talk about. Actual, gaming -related topics I may or may not find the will to discuss this week include:

• The Official Launch of Project:Gorgon
• Daybreak Games' decision to abandon Roadmaps
• The Return of Jack Emmert to Cryptic
• The Unexpected Signs of Life in Rift

I'm listing those out in the hopes it might induce me to write something about them later. I don't suppose it will but you have to try, don't you?

I could also just stop posting for a while but as you can see I'd rather bang out a few hundred words of waffle and blether rather than let the post count fall to danger levels. I can get one of these done in an hour, provided I don't attempt to say anything of import.

This is the exact time AI would come in very handy, isn't it? I could just feed those bullet points into Gemini or ChatGPT and have the glorified predictive text apps knock out the first draft. Then I could edit that to make it look less plasticky and who would be any the wiser? 

Did I do that already? Aha! Wouldn't you like to know?

Alright, I didn't. The AIs just aren't that good yet. It'd be even more work than writing one of the damn posts myself. 

I will throw in a couple of AI illustrations though because I have fecking hundreds of them stored up and I might as well use them for something. I have them because I do the daily challenge at NightCafe every day, so as not to break my streak, which is over a hundred days now, and I've gotten so blase about it I just click on whatever they suggest and let the AI play with itself.

Now, that is a post I do want to write: what the hell do the people behind NightCafe think they're playing at? How does it benefit them to give away orders of magnitude more credits for free than I find it possible to imagine anyone ever needing? Aren't they supposed to making money selling them? And why are all the prompts virtually identical? Robots, airships, decaying jungle ruins, explorers...

And now, since I seem to have wandered entirely off-topic, not that it was ever all that clear just what topic I was on, I think I'll call this post done.

Hope you enjoyed it. I enjoyed writing it but then I love free-styling. It's always fascinating, finding out what I'm going to say next.

Read It In Books

Even though I've been a compulsive reader almost all my life (I wasn't born knowing how to read, sadly, so I had to wait a few years before I could get started.) I have never been one of those people who keeps a record of my reading. Why would I? I don't keep records of anything I do - or not in any kind of organized fashion, anyway.

I do write this blog, of course, and before that I used to produce an apazine every two months for about a decade and a half, so there's plenty of written evidence to support my cultural experience but it's a sporadic trail at best. About the only time I ever tried to keep any kind of strict account of my reading habits was that one time in the 'eighties, when I hand-wrote a review of every book I read for a year.

Actually, I didn't even make it to the end of the year. I think I gave up in about October. That journal must be somewhere in the house. I wonder if I could find it...

The answer to that turns out to be "No", which is just as well. Otherwise, this would have derailed into a post about all the books I read in 1986 or whenever it was instead of what it's supposed to be, which is a review of Girl To City by Amy Rigby.

As I've said before, I tend not to write much about books here, even though I probably read at least forty or fifty every year. I don't know exactly how many since I'm not kwriting down the titles or using one of those websites or apps that collects and collates the details (Something even the thought of which gives me the shivers...) but it's pretty easy to tell just by looking at the discard pile. 

I tend to put each book I've read in a stack on the floor and keep adding more until the tower threatens to fall over. Then I start another one next to it. Eventually, when the whole thing becomes unstable, I'm forced to sort through them and find somewhere more permanent, generally another stack in another room. The perils of having a large house- there's always somewhere to put things, until one day there isn't...

The main reason I don't write as much about books as I do music or games or TV is that I work in a bookshop and I get a lot of my books for free, most of them as proofs which, as a training course I had to do this week reminded me, cannot be reviewed anywhere. Well, not legally.

I could review the published titles I read, many of which I also get for nothing, but I always feel a moral obligation to give my employer first refusal. It's not compulsory but it is strongly suggested that we place reviews of books we've read on our website, something I have never done. I don't want to put my reviews on any commercial website, whether or not its owned by someone who pays my bills, so the compromise is not to write any reviews at all. 

When I finally retire, I imagine I'll start reviewing books I've read here although chances are they'll be old ones. Once I stop getting my books for free, I plan to start an extensive re-reading program. 

I used to consider re-reading to be considerably more important than reading. My mantra used to be that the third time was the charm. I had a rationale all worked out, too. 

• Read One is for pleasure. You're enjoying the book so much you let it all wash over you. After you finish you're left with a strong emotional impression but it's most likely weak on detail. 

• Read Two is for comparison. As you progress through the book, things come back to you and you inevitably frame your new experience in terms of your old. You end up knowing how well the book has stood up to your memory of it and whether it meets your expectations but once again you probably haven't paid all that much attention to the technicalities.

• Read Three is for appraisal. By now, you probably know what to expect and the immediacy of your reactions should be muted. This is when all those details you never noticed before start to make themselves known and when you begin to understand the finer points of the structure and the architectonics. 

Any reads after that are either indulgence, obsession or you're an academic of some sort. God help you.

That was how I used to see it. I've loosened my views a little. There are many ways to approach a text. Still, the Three-Read Method seems pretty reliable to me.

With all that in mind, I'm happy to review Girl To City here for a couple or three reasons. 

Firstly, I paid for it myself. Granted, I only paid half price because that's a perk of my job but the training course I just did made no mention of the discount we get implying any responsibility beyond not abusing it by selling the books on EBay. 

I will not be selling Girl To City on EBay or anywhere else. I will be keeping it and one day re-reading it because it's very good. And then, no doubt, reading it a third time to discover what I really think about it. The older I get, the worse that plan begins to look.

Secondly, I have no intention of reviewing it properly. Mostly I just wanted to mention it so as to give it what little publicity I can, in the hope someone else might decide to get hold of a copy and read it, thereby giving themselves the pleasure and also putting a very small remittance into Amy's pocket.

Thirdly, in March the sequel, Girl To Country, will be published in the U.K. (It's out in the U.S. already, I believe.) I'll be getting a copy as soon as it's available and chances are I'll post about that one, too. If I was really patient, I suppose I'd wait until then and review the pair of them together but although I am quite patient I'm not a fucking stone.

Fourthly, though, and the real reason I wanted to post about it, was to embed this excellent promo video, which Amy made herself. 

You won't really know if you haven't read the book but that's truly excellent visual summary of the whole thing, coupled with a lyric that also stands as an extremely concentrated record of the core of the story. Quite brilliantly conceived, in fact. Pretty much a work of art in its own right, that video.

The only reason I know abut Amy Rigby at all is because she's been Wreckless Eric's musical and romantic partner for a good, long while now. I'm going to apologize for that right now. It's a crappy way to come to anyone's work but it can't be helped. That is what happened.

I've always been something of a Wreckless fan, although I can't claim to have kept up with his career the way I have, say, Lloyd Cole or Lana. A few years back, probably around the time of the pandemic, I thought to check what Wreckless was up to and I ended up buying a couple of CDs and subscribing to his excellent, if too-infrequently updated blog. Since he now both records and performs alongside his partner, I was introduced osmotically to Amy Rigby, who also happens to be a first-rate blogger. (I find the fact that he's on Blogger while she's on WordPress oddly amusing. I wonder if it means anything?)

It was the quality of Amy's blogging that made me want to read her memoir. Having read it, I can say she's not just a great blogger, she's a top-flight memoirist.

Memoir is a dangerous genre. There's a lot of... I guess the current buzzword would be slop. It's not like we ever needed AI for that. Ghost writers have been pumping it out by the barrel-load for decades. Good memoirs, though, are thrilling. This is a very good memoir.

It's good because it's extremely well-written. Amy Rigby has a strong and immediately recognizable prose style, lyrical, personal, warm and occasionally self-deprecating. In common with other songwriters whose books I've read, her prose has a musicality that lifts it off the page. It's a sensual pleasure similar to listening to her sing.

It's also good because she's had a ridiculously rich and interesting life, even though she barely seems to realize just how rich and interesting it's been. Some memoirs drop names on every page. Amy doesn't drop names, she scatters them like someone kicking through autumn leaves, scarcely noticing as they fly up all around. 

She lived in New York from the late '70s through to the '90s, arriving as an art student in her late teens, with a stint in London for good measure, leaving as a feted singer-songwriter with a rapturously-reviewed album. In-between, she met and hung out with just about everyone in the NY punk and no-wave scenes, sang, recorded and performed with everyone from Robert Quine to Warren Zevon and pretty much lived the fantasy life almost everyone I knew in the 'eighties would have killed to have had.

None of it made her any money. None of it made her famous enough that anyone reading this will ever have heard of her. (Prove me wrong in the comments, I dare you.) She was in  several bands, none of whose names you will recognize. I was fairly cognizant of the scenes she was a part of, or thought I was, and I'd never even seen the names so much as mentioned in passing until I read her book. 

Even her incredibly well-received and reviewed mid-nineties album, the magnificently-named Diary of a Mod Housewife, apparently famous enough to rate its own Wikipedia entry, rang absolutely no bells with me. I've listened to it online now and I can recommend it most highly. The song that backtracks the promo, Summer of My Wasted Youth, is from another album, the equally well-named Middlescence. I need to get CDs of all her albums...

Girl To Country is one of the least-glamorous music memoirs I've read, although that's a competitive field. In many cases, though, the lack of glamor is in itself glamorous, as in James Young's memoir Songs They Never Play On The Radio, about the time he spent with touring with a heroin-addicted Nico or Nina Antonia's The One and Only about heroin addict Peter Perrett. 

Unlike the subjects of those books, Amy Rigby isn't a tragic romantic with a fashionable habit. She's a girl from Pittsburgh who doesn't really know what she wants to do other than that she wants to do something. That something turns out to be music and she's good at it, which surprises her more than it surprises anyone. 

But all the time she's making music she's also holding down an endless series of temp jobs. She's so good at it they make her Temp of the Month. Playing guitar is cool and all but it don't pay the bills.

Half a century on, she's still out there, trucking her guitar and amp around small clubs in backwater towns, playing her songs to the handful of people who care. It's the rock and roll reality not the rock and roll dream and yet somehow it's the dream all the same. At least she doesn't have to temp any more.

I could go on but better I stop and let you go read the book for yourself. Or if you don't feel up to that level of commitment, at least go read her blog. 

I mean, we're all bloggers here, aren't we? You know it's the right thing to do.

The Inventory Full Pick Of The Year - 2025

It's New Year's Eve. Time for the Inventory Full Pick Of The Year. Oh, wait...you already knew that. It was in the title. The portentous, pretentious title. 

Putting the name of your blog in the title is the blogging equivalent of talking about yourself in the third person, something Inventory Full has been doing an awful lot of all through December. Should we be worried?

It's not even as though the title is self-explanatory. It requires some clarification. Music is what we're talking about. I'm sure as heck not going to go back over the entire three hundred posts and pull out all the so-called highlights. I'm not a crazy person!

Songs, though... that should be much easier. And, actually, I already did the prep. Twice. Once back in November or thereabouts, but I left the list on the hard drive of the old PC, and then again last week.  It seemed like it would be easier just to do the whole thing over again.

I'm not digging out the stats to prove it, but my sense is that I did fewer "What I've Been Listening To..."posts this year and left longer gaps between them. Partly, that's because I don't think it's been a particularly stand-out year for music. It's been fine but 2024 was epic, so I guess 2025 was always likely to suffer in comparison. 

The main reason for the shortfall, though, if there was one, wasn't so much lack of good tunes as it was too much AI. Go on, blame AI for everything, why not? It's not like it's going to argue. More like it'll tell me how right I am and what a great insight that was.

But in this case it's true. I spent countless hours making my own music using AI, time that would otherwise most likely been spent searching for and finding music made by others. Probably most of it would have been made by humans, too, although it's getting increasingly hard a) to pick out the sound of humans through the ever-increasing AI signal and b) to tell the difference when you do.

I did manage to make a handful of significant discoveries all the same, foremost among them being Sunday (1994) and R. Missing. I bought all the CDs Sunday (1994) were willing to sell me (One of each, that is, not carloads of the same one. I'm not some kind of crazy hoarder.). I would happily have done the same for R. Missing only she doesn't do physical. I guess that's why her channel was my most-viewed of the year on YouTube.

For the post, I went through all the posts in 2025 with a "Music" tag and pulled out any songs I could both remember and remember listening to more than twice. I deliberately stopped at thirty because the Top Thirty was the thing when I was growing up, before it turned into the Top Forty, which I never really believed. Also I didn't have forty solid picks.

Here's the longlist. 

• Sometimes You Have to Work On Christmas (sometimes) - Harvey Danger  
• A Winter Fairy is Melting a Snowman - 木村カエラ (Kaela Kimura
• Apple Of My Eye - Aimee Fatale
• Girls On The Internet - Elita
• Make Time/Waste Time - Snowmen
• iPod Touch - Ninajirichii
• Cowbella - Bar Italia
• Jamie Oliver Petrol Station - CMAT
• Manchild - Sabrina Carpenter
• went to bum a cigarette - april june
• Diet Pepsi - Blondshell
• Devotion - Sunday (1994)
• Kelly Was A Philistine - R. Missing 
• Pony Yeah - R. Missing
• Henry, Come On - Lana del Rey
• Rain - Sunday (1994)
• "23's A Baby" Blondshell
• The Wolf - Witch Post
• Braces - Sept
• Algernoon - nickateen
• Fuck It - Punchbag
• 1-800-Call-Me-Back - M(h)aol 
• Tired Boy - Sunday (1994)
• Blonde - Sunday (1994)
• TV Car Chase - Sunday (1994)
• The Summer Ends - Blondshell
• You Let My Tyres Down - Tropical Fuck Storm
• 鹽焗雞$alty Chick - 今晚好想好想打俾你
• (He'll Never Be An) 'Ol Man River - TISM (This Is Serious Mum)  
• POSH - The Pill

If I had nothing better to do, I might go through the whole thing and add links but I do have better things to do and no-one needs links anyway. There's a perfectly good search function right here on the blog if you're that interested. 

The list isn't in order, which is why I haven't numbered it. That would imply preference. It's almost in reverse chronological order but only because I started at the end of the year and worked backwards. Then I thought I ought to have something by The Pill, who I'd left out because I couldn't decide exactly what it was by The Pill that I ought to have. And when I made up my mind I just stuck it on the end, so that one's out of sequence. Probably others, too.

Acts on the list that I bought CDs by are:

Bar Italia

Blondshell

Sunday (1994)

I also downloaded the Ninajirichii album.

Somehow that seems to make those feel like I liked them more but I'm not sure that holds. For example, I put Addison Rae's album on my Christmas wishlist but no-one bought it for me. And now she doesn't even make the longlist, except by proxy, so what does that mean? And I asked for the second Wet Leg album, even though I didn't like any of the singles all that much. And then I got it and listened to it and I like it better than the first album, even though i like all the songs on the first album better than any of the songs on the second album. But Wet Leg aren't even on the long list so why are we even talking about them?

People do have to make records before you can buy them, too. Not everyone does, these days. I would have very happily bought CDs by Witch Post, Aimee Fatale and R. Missing if they'd made any. And, of course, Lana del Rey, who's now two years overdue for a new album but instead appears to have retreated into married bliss with the Everglades answer to Crocodile Dundee. 

All the others on the list I watched/listened to on YouTube. Repeatedly or they wouldn't be on the list at all. I ought to mention a couple that didn't make the cut - my favorite title of the year by a mile was "We'll Always Have Paris 1919" by Tenderness. The song didn't make the longlist, though. 

My favorite video was Sabrina Carpenter's Manchild, which did, but that didn't make the Top Ten. Go figure. Also, I didn't watch KPop Demon Hunters until last night so Golden didn't get a chance. It might have made the longlist at least, had I watched the movie when it came out instead of waiting weeks for no good reason. Maybe it'll be in next year's list, by when it'll be stale as biscuits.

I'm going to pull out a Top Ten now and it's going to need some rules. No more than one song by any artist and I have to have at least one thing to say about why I chose it. Also, they aren't going to be in any particular order. Not of merit, anyway.

That's enough rules and enough talk. Let's party like it's 2025!

Diet Pepsi - Blondshell (Covering Addison Rae.)

Performance of the year for me, as far as interpreting a lyric goes. Also cover of the year, although Magdelana Bay doing Ashes To Ashes runs it close. That nearly made the list but I couldn't really say I'd listened to it often enough. 

Sabrina recorded Diet Pepsi as a special for Sirius XMU, which isn't that far off singing it to herself in the shower. I see the link I used in the original post is now dead. Fortunately it did eventually find its way onto YouTube officially and also into her live set. 

I think as a vocalist she's probably my current favorite after Lana. She has an incredible, paradoxical ability to give a lyric an intense emotional charge, while at the same time her voice appears to lack any affect. It makes all her own compositions feel fogged and frightening in the best possible way. 

That effect is in overdrive on the second album. Where the first felt like an instant classic from the moment I heard it, the second took a lot longer to come through. She seems to hold so much back, lyrically and vocally, the songs are sometimes barely there at all. I'm all up with her now but it took a while to get there. 

As an interpreter of other people's songs, though, she's far more accessible. She did a superb cover of American Football's The Summer Ends but her take on Diet Pepsi topped even that. Addison Rae's writing is a lot more direct and she clearly has more time for a melody than Sabrina, who sometimes seems to be actively avoiding coming anywhere near one. The two approaches meld perfectly in this magnificent cover. It's notable that of the three Blondshell songs on this list, two are covers.

Tired Boy - Sunday (1994)

Not an easy choice. There are five Sunday (1994) songs on the list and there's next to nothing to choose between them. This was the first single and it's been in my head, on and off, all year. But then, so have they all. Oh, I don't know. I had to pick one and I've picked this. Could've been any of them. They're all magisterial.

Also, I've just discovered that using the word "Magisterial" in a Suno prompt gets you a vibe like theirs. I don't suppose they'd want to know that. 

 Pony Yeah - R. Missing

This is how I found her. I click on pony songs. Wanna make something of it? I used to think all pony songs were all always good and for a long time all of them always were but it's surprising how many there are. The streak had to break sometime. Still, it's a solid indicator. Better than tiger, which is also good. Anyway, this is a proof.

It's scary, isn't it, how random things are? If she'd called this something else I might never have known she existed. Although I would always have clicked on Kelly Was A Philistine. I mean, you'd have to, wouldn't you? Titles are so important. And so powerful.

And yet I have no idea what this song is about. Not ponies, that's for sure. 

The Wolf - Witch Post

Banger of the Year! I would totally have lost my shit to this on the dance-floor in the 90s. That fucking riff! That chorus! The supersaturated sound! 

Again, I just worked out that adding "supersaturated" to a Suno prompt is a magic trick. Add "all needles in the red" for extra raw. Now if I can just figure out how to make it overdrive the vocals instead of having everyone sound like a goddam choir-girl...

Cowbella - Bar Italia

Wouldn't you like to see Witch Post and Bar Italia up against each other in the final of a Battle of the Bands in the back room of a dive bar? Or in the nightclub scene of a Swinging Sixties movie? Some bands should never be seen in daylight. Most of the good ones, actually.

You Let My Tyres Down - TFS

Or Tropical Fuck Storm if you prefer, which I do. I just used the acronym in case it stopped the video flagging as Adults Only but I bet it didn't. I won't know until I publish but I'll leave it however it lands. (In fact it doesn't even work in the Preview so that's a wash.)

This isn't new. I think it's one of only two songs in the post that didn't come out in either 2025 or just before and even those two are from the 2020s. I listen to a surprising amount of Australian music these days which might be because a surprising amount of Australian bands are really good. They certainly seem to have this kind of spiraling, violent guitar squall cornered, anyway, along with the existential hooligan singing. It's all a bit Clockwork Orange sometimes. 

Braces - Sept

This is an odd one. I'm not sure how I stumbled across it. It's much more of a vibe than a song. It has that indefinable, plangent guitar sound I associate with South American indie rock. Quite a lot of the comments in the YT thread are in Spanish, too, which makes me wonder. The video seems like the most mannered, unreal vision to me but the comments are full of people going overboard about authenticity and their own lost teenage years, which does make you wonder where the hell these people went to school...

And then of course I had to google to see exactly where the band does come from... and it was a lot harder than you'd think to find out. Gemini doesn't know: "They appear to be an independent, indie music act based in the United States, as indicated by various social media and music platform snippets. Further details regarding their specific city or state of origin are not readily available in the search results."

I did a bit better on my own, once again demonstrating the value of AI assistance. This Instagram interview makes it pretty clear they're from Southern California. They also mention a bunch of other bands I'm gonna check out because they name some good names...

Apple Of My Eye - Aimee Fatale

One of the top comments reads "i had this on loop for a week straight im actually obsessed". I wouldn't go quite that far but I played it over and over when I first happened upon it. Haven't heard it for a few weeks and it sounds just as good now as it did then. She doesn't have a lot of songs out. Nothing in physical format but there's a live set on YouTube with several numbers I haven't heard yet. I'd listen to them all but the sound, particularly the vocals, is so muffled it's hard to tell how good the songs might be if you could hear them properly. 

Henry, Come On - Lana del Rey

I almost left this out just because every time I hear it, it reminds me just how damn long it's been since we heard anything new from Queen Lana. I don't think there's been a drought like this since I joined the cult back in aught-12. We didn't know how blessed we were, all those years.

Lana, Come On! 

A Winter Fairy Is Melting A Snowman 

 木村カエラ

What can I say? I spent longer thinking about this final spot than all the rest put together. I even went back through all the posts to see if I'd missed anything essential. I found a bunch of songs I might just as easily have included as most of the ones I did but no, I'd caught everything that really had to be here.

Then I thought about what would be the coolest one to end with, because you would, wouldn't you? And what would be the least cool, because that, too. 

In the end, though, I decided I ought to be honest and finish with the song I've probably listened to more often than anything else on the entire list. Which is this one. Really. I played it over and over going into Christmas and I just played it three times back-to-back as I wrote this paragraph. It's just... well, it is, isn't it?

And that's that for 2025. You could do worse than play these ten at your New Year's party tonight. You are having one, aren't you? You're not just playing video games and going to bed early again?

Fair enough, if you are. That's what I'm going to do! 

Never Mind The Music, Just Look At The Pictures

Here we are, in the dead zone between Christmas and New Year. Seems like as good a time as any to post the recap no-one needed. Or wanted. Yes, I'm going to debrief myself on how the 2025 Inventory Full Advent Calendar went. If you're ever in need of an example of pointless, self-indulgent navel-gazing, feel free to re-direct to this post.

As I may have mentioned before (Oh, I definitely have.) the one thing I don't enjoy about doing the annual musical door-opening extravaganza is not being able to keep up a running commentary as I go. It's hard work staying quiet, I can tell you.

I have a little leeway to offer passing observations, thanks to Redbeard commenting every day. It's turned into something of a regular double act after several years and at least it gives me the opportunity to say something about the songs. 

While I'm on the subject, thanks also to Tipa, the only other reader to leave any comments at all this year. Jolly good ones, too. 

Even if only two people enjoyed it, I'd feel it was a worthwhile exercise, but of course there were three because I had a great time putting it together. I imagine it's no secret I'm mainly doing it for my own amusement. 

It's so much fun every year that I'm always tempted to consider creating a new blog just so I can go on doing it. One where I'd post a song every day of the year. It would be so easy and so much fun. I imagine. Maybe the reality would be a bit different...

It's not as though it was just the three of us having our own private door-opening party all December, anyway. Page views for the Calendar were very consistent throughout the run; lower than on regular posts but still close to three figures, most of the time. I have no way of knowing how many of those page views also incremented the relevant YouTube counters but let's hope a few people clicked through out of curiosity, at least.

I'm not actually going to say much about the music in this post. I might cover that separately at some point, although that might be a self-indulgence too far. What I'm going to go into here is the way the posts were illustrated.

I can chip in a bit about the song choices but no-one ever mentions the pictures so I rarely get the chance to talk about them when replying to comments, which is ironic, given that's the part of the whole thing that takes me the longest and requires the most effort. 

Let me take a step back and outline my methodology. The way I tend to compose the calendar most years goes like this:

Stage 1. October going into November: trawl the internet for Christmas songs and find more than I'm ever going to need.

Stage 2. Mid-November: Mentally sort them into Possibles and Probables. Check I haven't used any of them in previous years. Start thinking about images. Decide on were and how to source those. Begin collecting and/or producing them.

Stage 3. Late November: Begin putting the first week's posts together so as to have at least a week in hand, going into December. This means picking some of the songs, finding appropriate images to go with them and editing those images if needed.

Stage 4. December: Keep producing posts, trying to stay at least a few days ahead but also start swapping everything around, bringing in new songs that weren't on the longlist, pairing songs thematically, developing themes on the fly and basically winging it more and more the further into the month it gets. This is when it starts to be really fun.

I never stop looking for new Christmas songs. Any good, new ones I find can always be added on the fly. Pictures are open to a certain amount of serendipity but it's a lot more constrained. Once I decide on the aesthetic and the source, that has to stay consistent for the whole Calendar. 

Unlike music, the use of images on the blog is fraught with concern. For music and video, YouTube covers all the liabilities automatically. So as long as I just embed videos correctly, using the tool included in Blogger for that purpose, there's no risk. Everything stays firmly inside Google's eco-system, where the issues of copyright are handled by the terms of your YouTube account. 

It's why, in the rare instance when I want to use something that isn't on YouTube already, I prefer to upload it to my YouTube channel and link to it from there, rather than upload it directly to Blogger from my own hard drive. It's a form of data-washing, I guess.

With images, it's riskier. Even with screenshots from games that you may have taken yourself, ownership is often unclear. Blatant "borrowing" from the web is like skipping across a minefield.

The most important thing is not to step heavily and inconsiderately on anyone's copyright, while also not paying anyone any money. Harder than you might think, especially when it comes to finding a couple of dozen Christmas and winter pictures to stick at the top of a post. 

I've used my own photographs in the past, which is probably both the safest and the most aesthetically satisfying choice, but I only have so many suitable shots and I've pretty much run through them all now, so that was out for this year. If we'd had any snow, I might have taken some new ones but we hardly ever get snow here before January, if at all. 

We do have one hell of a lot of sparkling lights up all over town, though. Next time, I might take some pictures of those. I could probably take twenty-five unique shots just in the cul-de-sac across the road.

For the first Advent Calendar, which I put together without a great deal of thought, I used copyright-free stock images. They were really not very pleasant to look at but I leaned into the cheese and tried to make it a feature. 

I did consider doing that again this year but if you search for "copyright free images" you may be surprised to find how little "free" choice you actually have. Nearly every site that offers them requires at least some kind of sign-up and some want some kind of subscription, too. I looked at it and decided it wasn't going to work.

The absolutely blindingly obvious solution was, of course, AI.  Artificially Intelligently Generated Images are de facto not copyrightable in most jurisdictions (Yet.) so the whole question of rights becomes a non-issue. Well, legally. Ethically, maybe not so much.

Better yet, you can very easily tailor the image to the music, either by prompting specifically for something you think would go with it thematically or by using an extract from the lyric as a prompt. I do like to do that. It's like a parlor game.

In 2023 and 2024 I used AI for the Calendar, either exclusively or partially. The models weren't as good then as they are now, but looking back at those pictures today, I still quite like most of them. Honestly, I'd be happy to have used AI again this year, too. Prompting for AI would have been easier, faster and at least as entertaining for me than what I did end up doing.

But using AI is not without controversy, as you may have noticed. And the Calendar is supposed to be a bit of holiday fun, not a seasonal wind-up. Why piss even a few people off unnecessarily by summoning the specter to the feast?

That's when I hit on the idea of going Pubic Domain. That would be safe enough, wouldn't it? And easy, too.

Yeah. Not so much as you might think. Most of the sites offering "PD" images also want you to make an account before you can get to the good stuff which, judging by the samples they let you see, might not even be that good anyway. Plus they often have a lot of small print about what you can and can't do with the images, too. I did use a few of those sources at the beginning but it was not much fun at all. 

And then I stumbled upon Wikimedia Commons. That's where about two-thirds of the images I eventually went with came from. 

It was a very lucky stumble. Not only does the site have a huge archive but it's user-friendly and very well-organized. There's a search function that really works, the images are displayed in a way that makes it very easy to spot something suitable right away and best of all, they've done all of the admin for you.

They tell you everything you need to know about the provenance of the image, what you can and can't do with it and what credit you need to give if you use it. Not only that, they provide all of that information in various formats, including html code ready to drop into your post as-is. All I had to do was cut and paste into Blogger and it worked perfectly every time.

That's why the latter half of the calendar has those neat attributions tucked away at the bottom of every page, where the earlier ones have ugly, fudged attempts, all done by me. The premades saved me so much time and effort.

Once I discovered that mother-lode, the mechanics were easy. What wasn't was matching a suitable image with the music. Geez, that was a thankless task, alright. 

First I had to figure out what sort of image I wanted. 

For example, on Day 10 I wanted to pair two songs that name-checked specific American retail outlets and restaurants with an image of a named American retail outlet or restaurant at Christmas or in winter. Didn't have to be the ones in the songs, Denny's or K-Mart. Any name I recognized would have done.

Could I find a public domain image to fit that brief? Could I Christmas!

Eventually I did but it took me ages and in the end I had to settle for a store I'd never heard of - Pick 'n Save. It sounded right and the image was certainly seasonal. Just as well. I couldn't find any others.

It was a little like that every day, although that was one of the hardest. Believe it or not, all the images are thematically linked to the titles or the lyrics of the song or songs of that day. Granted, the connections are pretty loose, especially in the first week, when I was still using a bunch of images I'd downloaded in November, but I soon dumped those and started looking for appropriate images after I'd picked the songs, not before. That went better.

It was fun-ish. I mostly did it late at night in bed on the laptop. It took me maybe half an hour each time.

There was minimal editing. Mostly I took the images as they came. Occasionally I made some minor changes. I took the "Midwest National Parks" logo off the bottom of Day 23 because I decided only one of the three songs qualified as midwest emo. I cropped the Murad cigarette ad for Day 18 and also saturated the colors a little.

It was a lot of work. If I'd used AI, would it have been faster? Almost certainly. Better, though?

Take that problematic Day 10. I'd have ended up with something like, oh, I dunno... that picture up at the top of the post, maybe? Is that better? Worse? About the same? 

Hard to say, isn't it? I really like the Public Domain shot. It has a lot of the bleakness of Communist Daughter's cover of Christmas at Denny's (The original, by Randy Stonehill, doesn't carry a fraction of the weight, for me.) but then it doesn't do much for Root Boy Slim and the Sex Change Band.  I don't think I want to see what AI would have done with that, either.

As for Eels and Birdcloud and their collective Christmas cool, I might have gotten something like this:

I mean, come on! Do you call that cool? The name of the brand is gibberish, the guy is holding two cigarettes - except he's not really holding either of them - two artists have signed the same picture and that pair of poseurs ooze entitlement, not cool. Otherwise I guess it's... fine.

So, yeah,. maybe the AI image generators haven't improved as much as I thought. And maybe I would have had to just as much work to get something I was willing to use, even if I had taken the supposedly easy option. 

In the end, I was happy enough with what I got from the Public Domain and I know there's plenty more waiting if I need to go back for more. 

Next year, though, I kinda think I might take some photos of my own. Hey! Maybe I should use all original, hand-taken pictures but make the songs with AI!

That is something AI is good at, after all.

Take Five Girls - or - Will The Real Cat Please Stand Up

The image you see above cost me £6,500. Or about 10 Euros. Or maybe it saved me a fortune. Depends how you want to count it.

Sometime back in the 90s, I was in Antequerra, a very pleasant, not much touristed town in Andalusia. I'd just been made voluntarily redundant after years of trying and I was celebrating my windfall by driving around Spain and Portugal in a hire car for three weeks, on my own.

After two weeks, I'd had enough of moving to a new place every day so I stopped in Antequerra for a while and while I was exploring the back streets I found a shop selling some idiosyncratic and unusual tees. 

I bought several. They were all odd. I never saw any like them again, anywhere. The one I wore the most and for the longest wasn't the one with the five girls. It was this one:

I wore that t-shirt a lot. I'd probably still be wearing it now if Mrs. Bhagpuss hadn't finally told me she couldn't stand it.

I have no idea what Space Motion 570 is supposed to mean, let alone Union Feel The Heat, which is what the very faded yellow-on-white lettering says, in case you can't make it out. I always thought it might have something to do with basketball but chances are it doesn't actually mean anything. (There's a DJ now who goes by Space Motion but I doubt they were even born when I got this shirt.)

Although that was the one I wore the most, it wasn't my favorite. My favorite was the one with the five young women on the front. Unfortunately, that one was just a tad too small for me so I couldn't wear it as much as I'd have liked.

They fascinated me, those women. Who were they? They were obviously all friends. I thought they looked like they were probably about the age to be in college. Maybe they were school-friends who'd left and gone their separate ways and now they were back for the long summer break and catching up. (It's clearly summer where they are, based on how they're dressed.) 

I figured they probably wouldn't all have gone into further education. The one in the beret, though? She definitely had. And the cool one in the middle in the bee-stripe dress and RayBans. Maybe the girl in black and white checks and polka dots was a year or two younger. Just graduated from high school and getting ready to join the others at university. Hearing all the stories about what it was like.

The one in the sensible skirt, carrying the shopping and the one in blue checking out what's in the bag? Maybe they share an apartment. The two that didn't go away to study. Maybe they're working already, doing classes on day release. 

Actually, now I look again, they've all got bags. So maybe they've been on a shopping trip together.

And so on. This is what I found myself doing every time I looked at the shirt. Speculating about who they might be. Making up backstories for them all. Like I'm doing now.

In the end I gave them all names and wrote a short story about the five of them. As I remember, it wasn't a very good story. I don't think I was all that satisfied with it. But I wasn't so down on it I was going to keep it to myself. I published it in the APA.

And then I forgot about it for a quarter of a century until earlier this year, when I dug out all my old fiction and zines and started scanning and digitizing them. It took a lot of digging around in closets and under the bed and up in the loft but eventually I found almost everything I could remember - except that one story. And the T-shirt.

It was frustrating. Not just because there was a piece of my past missing. There are plenty of those. One more isn't going to matter. No, it was frustrating because one of the characters from the story turns up in another sequence of vignettes that I had found. Only now I didn't know who she was.

Late on in my time with the APA I started reviewing a very specific literary sub-genre. No, not a literary genre - a publishers' one. Books that compare themselves to Catcher in the Rye on their covers.

Publishers just love to try to make readers think a book is going to be like something else they've read. They're all scavengers, feeding on the kills of others. If anything ever sells they have no idea why but they're all sure if they copy the cover design they'll be able to sell a bunch more books to readers who clearly can't tell the difference. The same logic prevails with comparisons to other writers and other books.

Since Salinger was at the time my favorite writer and Catcher my favorite novel, two facts that may or may not still be true, I was prone to picking up copies of any books that claimed to be the same or similar. Not because I thought they would be. More to find out the ways in which they weren't.

Some were pretty good all the same and I wanted to share my thoughts on them. But I needed a framework. Because I was even more pretentious then than I am now and I never could just write anything straight.

Which was how I came up with the idea of having Phoebe Caulfield review the books that were supposedly like the one her brother was in, all those years ago. Or Phoebe Maybe, as I've just now realized I should have called her. Who knows if she really was Holden's sister? She never did find out who she was and so far neither have I. Not for sure.

My Phoebe lived in a rambling old house with a walled garden. It was based on the Quaker Meeting House where I used to go on Sundays as a child. It always spooked me out. 

Phoebe lived with ghosts. Her ghosts were other characters I'd written about. Or lived with. I lived with Cathy for years. She was my imaginary friend long after I was too old to have one. My imaginary imaginary friend. I think I was still at University when I last saw her although I wouldn't count on her not coming back some time.

There was Cathy from my past and Rachel and Sally from the proto-novel I was writing at the same time and then there was Cat. Cat was one of the women on the T-shirt. The only one whose name I remember and that only because she lives with Phoebe.

And now I was turning all of this into songs and I needed to know. Who Cat was. Which is how I came to be turning the house upside down, looking for that last, elusive, photocopied zine. And also the damn T-shirt!

So far, I still haven't found the story. I live in hope. It's impossible that I wouldn't have kept it. It's just that the house is full of paper. It could be between anything.

The shirt, though. That I found. Eventually.

But before I finally remembered where it was (In a small compartment tucked away under the lid of a blanket chest made by my great-grandfather, who I never met.) I went looking for it in the racking under the boiler that supplies the heat for the heating system in this house. Or used to.

It was in a cupboard whose doors probably hadn't been opened since the pandemic. The heating system was in place when we moved into this house and that was the best part of thirty years ago. It's never really been touched in all that time.

When I opened those doors to look for the shirt, what I saw was a disaster about to happen. The boiler was rusting away at the base. Bits of the pipework were starting to sag. When you have a house, there are some problems you can kick down the road to Spring or Next Year and some you have to deal with Now. This was one of those.

So we got it done. We have a brand new heating system. It's great and it's guaranteed for seven years with an annual service contract. We're good on that front for a while. It cost £6,500. 

Six grand, ten Euros or a small fortune. It's a good thing I needed to find that T-Shirt when I did. 

Now if I can just find the damn story. I still need to know just who Cat really is. 

Name In The Title? Numbers Go Up. (Not A Post About Blue Protocol: Star Resonance, Although There Are Some Screenshots.)

A while back, I mentioned that it looked as though Google and/or Blogger had changed something about the way they record page views. That's remained consistent ever since (Okay, it's only been a few weeks...) and it's given me a much better idea of which posts get noticed and why.

Surprise, surprise - it has a lot to do with two things: the topic of the post and whether you can tell from the title what it's about. Who'd have believed it, eh?

Over the many years I've been doing this, I've gone through a number of phases regarding how I come up with titles. Back at the very beginning I used short, often familiar, phrases I thought were a clever or witty match for the content, like "I Can See Your House From Here" for a post about flying mounts or "Again! Again!" for one about repetition in MMORPGs.

I kept that up for a good while but very quickly I also started adding the name of the game I was talking about, as in "Home Is Where The Art Is: EQ2" (Also, note how I used to call the game "EQ2" not "EQII", as I do now. The Label is still EQ2 because of that.) I carried on doing it that way for many years but as time went on I diversified. There were more and more posts with no named game in the title and it became increasingly hard to know what the topic was until you started reading (And often not even then...)

I'd always used pop culture references in my titles, particularly song titles or snatches of lyrics, but by the late twenty-teens that trend had pretty much taken over. Probably as a result of having a lot of time off work, what with my chemo and then the pandemic, meaning I had a lot of time to fill, I started using song lyrics almost exclusively and the more obscure the better. I used to spend almost as long scouring lyric.com for suitable phrases as I did writing the posts.

When that phase was at its height it was often next to impossible to figure out from the title alone what a post was going to be about. When I look back through the blog for something I know I posted about during that period, I have to use the Search function to find it because I no longer have any idea what most of the titles are supposed to mean. For example, a post called "A Dead Squirrel That I Hit" turns out to be about Divinity: Original Sin 2 and another going by the name of "I'm In A Film Of Personal Soundtrack" gives my thoughts on music in video games.

Throughout this phase I still sometimes appended the name of a game to the title but if I found a quote or lyric fragment I really liked I'd generally let it stand on its own for aesthetic reasons. It was fun for quite a while (For me, that is. Possibly not so much for anyone trying to figure out what the hell I was writing on any given day.) but eventually finding suitable lyrics turned into a bit of a chore so I stopped.

That was followed by a short period when I tried to make the titles as declarative as possible, sometimes to a parodic extent, as in, for example... well, it didn't last long, I can't remember anything specific and I haven't been able to find anything by random browsing but it was a thing for a bit, just take my word for it.

After that, in the most recent phase before the present-day, I've tended just to use whatever seemed like a good idea at the time. A bit of all the above and a lot of whatever took my fancy on the day. 

And none of it seemed to matter all that much because I couldn't really tell who was reading what or even how many readers there were. 

I did once think I knew. Long, long ago I used to follow the stats religiously and they were pretty consistent. We're talking a decade or so back there. I used to be able to track a steadily-rising graph that seemed to indicate a growing readership and it kind of made sense.

After a few years, though, all the lines started to head for the stars. I know i posted about it once or twice, when the phenomenon was new and briefly exciting - tens of thousands of views per post! It became apparent soon enough that almost none of those views was real, though, and it was far too much trouble to try and dig any convincing numbers out of the slurry of false positives, so I just gave up looking at the stats at all.

For quite a few years I looked Blogger's own stats maybe two or three times a year at most. I stopped using Google Analytics years before they shut it down and I didn't sign up to the replacement. About the only time I really checked the numbers was after Blaugust, just to see if it made any impact. It didn't seem to.

And then came the recent shift in how the data is gathered, still unexplained but now very much the New Way of doing things. And it's much better.

It's also much worse in that I'm seeing hugely reduced visitor numbers but it seems far more likely they represent some close approximation of reality, not least because the statistics now correlate convincingly with the topics of the posts and especially with the titles. 

As soon as I saw what was happening, I re-instated my former policy of including the names of games in the header, whenever appropriate. When not writing about games, I've tried to make the titles at least marginally relevant to the content. 

I'm not a zealot about it. If a post is itself somewhat fuzzy or unfocused then I'm happy to have the title reflect that. I also still go with something that amuses me or that I think looks smart, on the occasions anything like that comes to mind.

And it seems to have some effect. Regular posts with no named game in the title all end up with roughly the same viewership numbers after a week or two, suggesting a fairly consistent readership. Interestingly, it runs at around a third of my subscriber numbers as reported by Feedly, which could either mean two-thirds of my supposed followers have forgotten I exist or that all of them can only stomach about a third of what I'm offering them. 

Or anything in-between, I guess. I imagine it's a bit of a mixture. I'm just happy anyone comes back at all.

Certainly most people leave no trace. I get plenty of comments, for which I'm perpetually and eternally grateful because comments are the life-blood of a blog, but I don't get that many commenters. It's mostly the same names, many of whom are bloggers themselves, on whose blogs I also leave comments. It's all very cosy and a big part of why I keep doing this but it doesn't tell me a great deal about who else is reading this stuff.

One thing that's very noticeable, now I can see the trends so clearly, is that increased page views do not lead to more comments. Since the new accounting took over, it's very plain that posts about specific games get about twice the page views and posts about hot new titles that have just launched or otherwise entered the news cycle get anything up to four times the base figure. 

And yet all of them still have the same kind of comment numbers. Only once in a very rare while do I get a comment from someone I've not heard from before or even an anonymous comment. More people are finding the clearly-labeled posts about topical content, sure, but whether they're finding anything they like when they get there is as mysterious as ever.

The question I've been asking myself is, now I have this semi-reliable method of assessing the success of what I'm posting, what, if anything, am I going to do with it? The answer is almost certainly going to be "Not much."

In the last month, my most-viewed posts, by a good margin, have been those on Blue Protocol: Star Resonance. As it happens, I'm still playing that game and I do have more to say about it so there will be some more of that. It will be instructive to see if those gain the same traction or if  BP:SR's shine has already faded. At least I have some kind of benchmark to judge against now.

I won't, obviously, be writing about games (Or anything else.) that I'm not interested in just because it gets attention but I will be making sure to mention the names of games I do write about in the titles. In general, I plan on maintaining a level of clarity in the titles that would have been anathema to me a few years ago, when I was actively attempting to make them as incomprehensible as possible.

Of course, I may just get bored of that and move into some as-yet unthought of new phase. Stats are all very well but you can't let them get in the way of self-indulgence creativity.

If anyone was hoping this post was going somewhere, I'm afraid I'm going to have to disappoint you. This is about as far as it's going to go. I got so bored writing it a few paragraphs back I was going to give up on it altogether but then I realized that would mean I'd have to start over on something else, either that or miss a posting day, so carrying on seemed like the easier option, but I can't say I'm thrilled about it. Congratulations to anyone that's made it this far! 

Before I finish, does anyone remember that thing Darkpaw were doing with the new Creator Program for EQII? I wrote something about it. I wasn't very complimentary. 

Well, it's happened. They flagged it up on the Launcher recently. I'm not sure when but I only noticed it last night. The forum post about it went up on Saturday. Eleven Creators have been inducted in the first tranche, including Fading, who runs The EverQuest Show, and our very own Stargrace.(Who seems to be operating from a new blog I didn't have in my Feedly or Blogroll. I do now!) None of the others have I heard of before. 

Good luck to all of them. The only thing I have to contribute is that, now I can see some stats I believe to be relatively reliable, I can confirm that clearly-labeled posts about EQII tend to get double the baseline views, so perhaps there is some kind of audience for the game outside the forums after all. 

I can't say I believed it until now. 

This Content Isn't Available

 

"As of this morning, on this account, on my desktop PC, all videos show a black screen with the message "Video Unavailable. This content isn't available". This happens when I try to run the videos directly from YouTube and also when I try to watch videos I have embedded on my blog.

I have logged the account out and back in, cleared the cache, rebooted the machine and tried a different browser. It makes no difference. 

On the same account, on my laptop, the same issue occurs when I access YouTube directly but the embedded videos on my blog still play normally. 

Please correct whatever is causing the issue or, if there is a valid reason for it, please let me know what it is and if there's anything to be done.

Thanks!"

That's the feedback I just submitted to Google in the vague hope someone might do something about it. There are several lengthy reddit threads on the problem, which seems to be fairly common. There are some workarounds that I might try at some point but those have issues of their own, but most of the commenters who report the problem being resolved say it either just went away on its own or after they submitted feedback. 

For others, it didn't  ever go away, or if it did, they didn't feel it was worth coming back to the thread to let anyone know.

I only noticed the problem this morning, after I'd written the first four paragraphs of today's post. I went to last year's Best of 2024 post to check something. I clicked on the link in that post that goes to the playlist I made to accompany it and that's when I found nothing was working. 

At the moment, my other YouTube account is working normally but comments on the reddit threads confirm others have seen the issue spread  to all their accounts. Also, I'm not sure whether the videos embedded on the blog are working for anyone else. 

I'm guessing they are because when I log into one of my many other Google accounts on Chrome I can play videos on the blog and also follow the link to last year's playlist and get that to run, too. I'm listening to it right now. 

God, it's good, too! If you want to test it, here's the link. It's a joy. 2024 was a vintage year for music. 2025 isn't going to match it. 

If anyone isn't able to access that playlist or watch videos on this blog, I'd be grateful if they'd mention it in the comments although I don't imagine there's much I can do about it. Also, if anyone's had this happen to their YouTube account, I'd be interested to hear about that, too. Especially if you figured out how to fix it.

There's a lot of speculation in the threads I read about what might be behind this loss of service. The usual conspiracy theories about Google trying to penalize people for using ad-blockers or even for watching too many videos. Those I discount. 

More credible is the explanation that there's been some security issue with the account (As recently happened to Belghast.) or some penalty applied for an infraction. That, though, would presumably lead to some kind of notification. I haven't seen anything telling me I've done something I shouldn't have.

It looks a lot more like some kind of bug to me. If so, it might get fixed. I'm cautiously optimistic. How long it would take is another matter, though. Could easily be weeks. Or months.

In the meanwhile, I can obviously just move to using another account to keep using YouTube for all my regular viewing needs (And keep making more accounts if they keep failing.). It's going to be annoying but as Wreckless Eric says, we adjust.  

The big question is whether I can work around the problem while it lasts so as to be able to go on embedding videos on the blog. It is, after all, a rather significant element in the range of content here. 

And it's a particularly bad time for it to happen, too.

Here are the four paragraphs I mentioned writing before the issue made itself known: 

Yesterday was the most musical day I've had for a long while. I spent something like five hours writing the What I've Been Listening To Lately post, then went straight into making a long-list for my Pick of the Year. That took another couple of hours and went a lot better than I thought it was going to before I started.

What I have really been listening to for most of the year is my own music. Obsessively and repeatedly. While I've been keeping up with everything else that's around, I can't honestly say I've had anything much on repeat that I didn't make myself. I was expecting to look back through the year's music posts and see a whole load of songs and names I could barely remember, so I was very pleasantly surprised to find that wasn't in the slightest bit true.

Okay, there were some titles and names I didn't recognize but that happens every year. The further I look back, the more of them there are, too. It's natural. The point is, there weren't any more this year than there usually are and better yet there were plenty where my immediate reaction was "Oh, I love that one! I want to hear it again, right now!"

Going in, I thought I might have to reduce the scope to a Top Ten this year. Last year it was a Top Twenty-One for some bizarre reason, only seventeen of which I chose to include on the YouTube playlist I completely forgot I ever made.

And then I found out about the problem. And stopped.

So, yeah, Pick of the Year post. I was looking forward to getting started on that. On hold for now.

Plus, I was just about to go on to talk about this year's musical Advent Calendar. That's more critical. I only realized yesterday there are just three weeks left until I have to start posting a Christmas tune every day. (It will be just one a day this year. That Naughty/Nice thing nearly did for me last time...)

It will still be happening, at least so long as I'm sure anything I put up on the blog will be visible and audible to anyone who cares to see and hear it. If I have to go around the houses a few times to make it happen, I'll do it.  

I'll try and make any workarounds as invisible and seamless as possible but if things look a little weird around here for a while, that might be the reason. 

And if it gets fixed I'll be sure to tell everyone.