Mr. Barnabus Builds His Dream House - #3 In The Series No-One Asked For!

There very nearly wasn't a post at all today thanks to the insidiously addictive nature of building houses in video games. I was in the middle of trying to figure out how to build some stairs and very nearly getting somewhere when Mrs Bhagpuss asked me if Beryl had been fed, which led to me asking what the time was and finding out it was an hour later than I thought because time just evaporates when you get into the fiddly detail of a build.

Or it does for me, which is why I'm always extremely wary of any game that has base building, as it seems to be called these days, as a feature. It's the most "just another ten minutes..." of all game activities as far as I'm concerned. I don't relish the loss of control. Especially when those ten minutes turn into two hours as they inevitably will.

To pick up where we left off last time, having cobbled together what has to be the smallest, ugliest, most pathetic shack I have ever built in any game, I moved on to something better. A big, ugly shack.

Okay, not quite that bad. The next build was more of a wonky bunker. The important thing wasn't what it looked like, though, It was the size of it. The first, my Ratonga Warlock could barely fit inside. The next had ceilings three times his height.

What happened was that I suddenly remembered that one of the most useful features of housing items in EverQuest II: scalability. You can blow anything up or shrink it down to quite a significant degree. With that in mind, it occurred to me it would be a lot easier to make a big house if I used big blocks. 

So I tried it and it really wasn't. I'd forgotten how thick it would make the walls. As thick as the actual walls of a real medieval castle and then some.   

Luckily, I'd also thought of an alternative to building with blocks like a five year-old giant. How about walls? There was a whole set of walls in my Carpenter's books. The set is called Seru's Duplicitous Tileset and I have no clue how she got it but among other things it makes sections of wall with frames for windows and doors. Just what I needed.

I got her to make twenty or so of each, went through the rigmarole of passing them across via the shared bank and then got on with building something out of them. It was not as easy as it could have been, mostly because I hadn't considered the flatness of the surface when I picked my plot. It's hard to line up walls when the ground slopes down to the sea.

Once again, EQII's wide-ranging options for placement and alignment came to my rescue. Well, almost. You can swivel and rotate objects and also raise and lower them. Most importantly, you can sink walls down through the earth and into each other which makes it easy to line them up so there aren't any gaps at the joins or at the bottom on sloping ground.

Sadly, the same can't always be said of the top. Still, I muddled through, eventually. There were a lot of small gaps here and there, some of the walls were far from straight and the top edges were a bit jagged but it was better than my first attempt.

Of course, it didn't have a roof. There are, as far as I can tell, no roofing items you can make or buy, let alone any prefabricated roofs. There are also no ceilings per se. For those you need to use floor tiles. I guess one person's ceiling is always another one's floor. 

I had my Carpenter knock out fifty floor tiles from the Seru set and with some of those I put a flat roof on top. Oh, how simple that makes it sound. It took me ages and it looked terrible. I had to overlap tiles to cover all the gaps because not only is there no snap-to-fit, the area I was trying to cover wasn't even a regular shape, thanks to the walls not being straight.

I got it done somehow. It looked awful. But it was late and I had to stop so I left it at that. I had, at least, learned something and also I was starting to find placing things and lining them up a little easier.

When I came back to it today, really I should have torn the whole thing down and started again. But I didn't. I had some walls left so I thought I'd add a second story. And when I'd done that, I thought I might have a bash at a roof. A sloping roof.

That was fun. I worked out how to place the tiles on the floor, raise them up and swivel them. You have to do it that way because if you try to put them on the walls themselves they insist on sitting half on one side and half on the other. Nothing ever wants to go where you want to put it. It's infuriating.

There are ways around it, though. All of which make the end result look like a barn that's barely survived a tornado going through. But it's a roof. And it slopes!

That took an hour or two. Shame I didn't think about the trees when I started. In some games, if foliage gets in the way you can chop it down. Here, it just has to stick through the walls. Maybe I'll put a wardrobe over the branches. It'll be like Narnia.

The main lesson I'd learned by this point was to take a very great deal more care about where to put the damn house in the first place. The second was to build on a firm foundation. I see what those blocks are for now.

For the time being, though, I had a two-story building with a roof. Good start! No windows or doors, of course, but you can't have everything. 

Except I wanted some windows and doors. I know you can have doors, at least. I remember making some before, when I was building a Gnome Trap (Don't ask...) I got the Carpenter out again and had a more careful look through her recipe books and yes, she can make doors. Quite a lot of different doors. Wood, metal, stone, jail. All sorts of doors.

She made a couple of wooden ones and I played around with those for a bit. It was surprisingly easy to scale them up, fit them into the frames and get them opening and closing. Very much the wrong sort of doors for the rest of the build but with proof of concept established, I'll make some more suitable ones later.

Windows, though... Windows were a lot harder. I couldn't figure it out. I had to go look it up out of game in the end.

It transpires the main reason I couldn't find any recipes for windows in my Carpenter's books is that Carpenters don't make windows. Makes sense. Windows aren't made of wood, are they? 

So who does? Tinkerers, mostly. Also there are some holiday-themed windows that anyone can make. I had a look at what was available and settled on the Frostfell ones. They have a snow effect that seemed ideal for the setting. Most windows seem to come with a visual effect of some kind. What you can't have is a good, old-fashioned, plain glass window you can see through.

Getting my hands on the Frostfell windows was a bit of a performance. There were some comical misadventures in the Frostfell Winter Village, where I thought I might be able to buy them, ready-made, off the elves and goblins (They don't sell them.) Then I thought I'd need to use the workbenches in the Village to craft them only I couldn't find where they were. (Didn't even need them anyway. I'd forgotten I have my own set of all-year-round Frostfell crafting stations in the Mara home.) 

Eventually I got it all figured out, made myself half a dozen of the two types of window, vertical and horizontal, and went to fit them into the frames. And guess what? They don't fit.

Not even close. Neither of them. This is the part I don't get. Why even have tile sets with window-frames if none of your windows fit the holes?

I'm convinced I must have missed something. It makes no sense otherwise. Maybe I need to do a bit more research, although it won't be easy. Information on any of this seems hard to find. 

For now, though, I have a reasonably effective workaround involving scaling the windows up and sinking them into the walls. The end result doesn't look too bad. Not compared to the rest of the shoddiness, anyway.

All of that took much longer than I thought because time moves at an entirely different pace when you're building. When I finally had to stop, I was in the middle of figuring out how to build those stairs. I think I have it but if I'm right it's going to take a lot longer than I want to spend doing it. 

Who needs stairs when you can fly, anyway? Do birds have stairs? No, they do not!

And that is as far as I've gotten so far. This post ended up a lot shorter than I was planning, thanks to the building itself taking much longer so I guess we all dodged a bullet there. I strongly suspect this will not be the last in this series,either, but I have to go to work tomorrow so at least we can all have a day off before the next not-so-thrilling installment. 

I don't know about anyone else but I bloody well need one. Building is fun but it's hard work.

Island Life In EverQuest II

Back on Black Friday, Wilhelm at TAGN posted a piece about the cash shop in Palia and "micro" transactions in general. In the course of the piece, he pointed out that unspent cash-shop currency is a drag on the balance sheet for the Accounts Department and the last thing they want you to do is hoard the damn stuff and never spend any of it.

Which, of course, is what I do all the time. It's partly due to something Wilhelm was complaining about, namely how tough it can be in most games to find anything at all in the cash shop that seems like it's both good value and worth buying in the first place. For me, it often seems as though everything in most in-game stores is either ridiculously overpriced or hard to figure out why anyone would want it at any price.

I spent a decade playing Guild Wars 2, for example, and in all that time just about the only things I ever bought were storage upgrades. Those were useful but, like just about everything in the Gem Store, very expensive, so I always waited until they went on sale, which they reliably did - once a year. 

Even at that attritionally slow rate of purchase, I still had all the storage space I wanted, if only because of diminishing returns. No-one can ever have enough storage space in GW2 for the intentionally overwhelming torrent of very-slightly-not-quite-worthless items that rains down on you whatever you do but at some stage having more room to stash it all  just adds to the sense of desperation that the flood is never going to stop and you'll drown in all that junk you can't quite bring yourself to destroy.

Ahem. This wasn't supposed to be a post about GW2 and its many shortcomings. Or, for that matter, about inventory management, although I could tell you some tales...

Getting back to the point, thanks to a combination of overpriced and/or unattractive stock in the shops and my personal psychology, which, thanks presumably to convictions instilled in me, growing up, by people who lived through two world wars and a global depression, leads me to feel a lot more comfortable with funds unspent than with the not exactly essential goods or services those funds might have purchased, I tend to build up a lot of savings in any game I play for more than five minutes.

It doesn't help that I also suffer from choice paralysis. If a game is lucky enough to have developers willing to fill their stores with useful and attractive items at reasonable prices, my eyes glaze over as I stare at them through the shop window, incapable of deciding which to buy. 

The EverQuest II cash shop is pretty good as these things go. There's a lot of vaguely useful stuff in there, not least because Darkpaw has been running a soft Pay-to-Play regime for many years. At least, it has if you want to get groups or, god forbid, start raiding. Then you either have to come at the game like it was a full-time job or get your credit card out. 

Or, so I understand, from the forums, which I confess may not represent the most unbiased testimony. As a solo, casual player, though, none of that really affects me at all. I could buy Familiars and Mercenaries and throw them down a well to boost the various buffs and boosts and bonuses that gives but why would I bother? 

Ditto the xp boosts and spell research reducers and all the other time-saving devices. I don't even use most of the ones I get for free, so why would I want more? 

Same story with the cosmetics. I have so many of those I literally had to designate a character to hold them all in storage for everyone else. That character has a bank full of costumes and appearance gear. And still no-one uses any of it!

All the while I'm not buying anything from the cash shop, my funds keep increasing. Not because I ever spend a cent on cash shop cash. Not for at least a decade and a half, anyway. I did, once, back in the glory days of SOE, when Smed's team were so far out of touch with reality that they ran Triple Station Cash sales and let you buy expansions off the back of them.

I bought some Station Cash then, alright. Everyone did. It was like they were giving it away. And then, naturally, I never spent most of it. I still have it. Some on my main account. More on the account that used to be my main account back then. And still more on Mrs. Bhagpuss's long-dormant account. And her second account. Darkpaw's accountants have got to love us...

Most of what I have on my subbed account doesn't come from those long-ago sales but from the monthly 500DBC stipend that come with the subscription. That adds up over time. 6k a year and it's a rare year when I spend even a third of it. 

When I logged in this morning I had just shy of 35k in the bank. 

So I bought an island. 

Frostfell has started. I knew it had because I saw Stargrace's post about it last night. This morning I thought I'd check if there was anything new for this year, which there isn't, really, other than the expected stuff you can buy either for gold and platinum in game or for DBC in the store. There's a new Achievement and some new places where you can mark your name for everyone to see (Always inexplicably popular.) A couple of odds and ends but no new quests or anything like that.

And, really, why would there be? Do you have any idea how big the Frostfell event is?  No? Go read Angeliana's post on the forums then! She lists over two dozen specific quests, many of which are actually quite lengthy chains, and that's not even all of them. Plus the gazillion other non-quest activities and entertainments you can enjoy between now and the fifth of January. It sounds like a long stretch but if you wanted to do everything, it'd probably take you that long.

But as I was skimming the list I spotted something I hadn't seen before: "Introducing your own wonderland."

A Prestige House. Now that's one thing I will spend my funny money on. I bought one only a couple of months ago, during the other big holiday of the Norathian year, Nights of the Dead. I think I mentioned it in passing but I didn't do a post on it. I was probably waiting until I'd decorated it, which of course I haven't.

Haven't set foot in the place, in fact. Redbeard was saying only yesterday how decorating wasn't really his thing. He was spurred into talking about it by the arrival of housing in World of Warcraft, my own thoughts on which I originally intended to include in this very post. We're a long way in now, though. It seems a bit late to start. Probably better to save it for a post of its own.

Decorating kind of is my thing, as in I enjoy it and I'm not bad it it, both in game and in real life, but in both cases the downside of decorating is that it takes ages. I have several well-decorated houses in EQII, not all of them on the account or even the server I currently play on, but every one of my characters has at least one home and most of them have several and I just do not have the time to make all of those houses look good.

Or even most of them. I ought to log everyone in and count the houses one day. I would guess that, just on  my main account alone, there are more than fifty. Who has time to decorate that?

So, naturally, I've just bought another. Only this one is a little different. 

Most Prestige homes, even if they're really full zones, which in EQII they often are, come with a pre-built residence of some kind. Mara, for example, the place where my Berserker has been living for many years, ever since he moved out of his huge, sprawling Maj`Dul mansion, is a full zone with a complete town, many of the buildings in which are fully habitable.

Winter's Island, the absolutely beautiful new Prestige Home I signed the deeds on today, is exactly that: an island. Small, somewhat bean-shaped, in the middle of a blue, blue sea. It has an odd climate. Winter at one end, Fall at the other. Grass or snow. Bare branches or autumn leaves. 

All around, sticking out of the sea like spikes, are rocky islets. At least twenty of them by my count. Most of which you can get to and build on. 

The place is big. Bigger than it looks. I flew between the two farthest-apart rocky islets and timed myself on a stopwatch. It took more than three minutes on a fast flying mount. Just to ride from one end of the main island to the other takes half a minute.

As Angeliana says "There is so much potential." There really is because all you have to start with is some land and a lot of sea. 

Here's where EQII differs from many theme-park MMORPGs when it comes to housing. (The exceptions I can think of would be WildStar, which hardly counts any more, and maybe Rift.) You aren't limited to decorating. You can also build.  

In the before-times, back when Mrs. Bhagpuss used to be big on the decorating scene, all building had to be done by re-purposing existing furniture items, something people did with enormous imagination and skill. Latterly, though, Darkpaw has catered to the obvious demand by supplying actual building materials, bricks, tiles, stairs, doors, windows, the lot, all of which you can obtain in abundance both through crafting and questing and via the Cash Shop.

I have never built anything in EQII. Which, now I come to think of it, is weird. I build things all the time in survival games. I've been doing it for years. Until now, though, when I'm in Norrath I've been content to stick to decorating.

Will Winter's Island change all that? I have no idea. Yet. 

If I do get the building bug, though, maybe it'll finally give me something to spend my imaginary money on.

Or You Could Always, Y'know, Write Less?

All year I've been talking about not spending as much time playing video games as I used to but, coming into November, I think I might have hit a twenty-five year low. If I play more than a couple of hours a day now it's a big gaming day for me.

I'm not having one of those burnouts that used to be so common and which I always found so peculiar. I seem to hear a lot less about those lately. I guess most of the folks that were prone to them have flamed and faded now, leaving the rest of us slow-smoldering remnants slowly turning into gaming charcoal, barely glowing, giving off almost no heat at all.

No, I haven't had enough of gaming. Nor have I really chosen to take a break. It's just happening.

It's as if a lot of other things have drifted up and gently nudged me off the gaming highway I was on, leaving me to putter down the slow, meandering back roads of the hobby instead. I'm not even sorry about it, really, although it does feel odd, if I stop and think about it

I've commented before about how strange it is that the more free time I have in theory, the less free all my time feels in practice. I got a lot more gaming in when I was working full-time than I ever have since I reduced my hours and shifted down into semi-retirement, that's for sure. Also I watched a lot more movies then and read more books. 

I strongly recommend anyone who thinks they can safely defer their cultural experiences until they retire to think again. I had so many plans about what I'd use the extra time for when it came. Not a one of them feels realistic now I'm almost there. That whole "Ask a busy person" saw applies to leisure, too.

All of which might sound a little negative, which would be misleading. I'm enjoying my new routines. Well, by and large. For example, following her minor heart-attack in the summer, I have to go visit my 93-year-old mother three times a week now rather than the couple of times a month, which had been my schedule for years. It could have been a problem but it led me to acquire a car of my own for the first time in many years, which feels good and it's a very pleasant drive. I like driving anyway, so it's nice to have a reason to be doing it.

Then there's Beryl. One of the big eaters of time in recent years has been having a dog around. I spend more time almost every day taking her for walks and playing with her at home than I spend on gaming and I can't help thinking that's a good thing. 

I've always loved being outdoors, walking, in both city and country but I'd fallen a little out of the habit, particularly when my gaming time was at it's peak. Even when I made the effort, I wouldn't bother if the weather wasn't great. Now I'm out every day for at least a while, although it should be said that Beryl is not a fan of wet weather. If the rain isn't actually hammering down, though, we can usually find somewhere to go for a half-hour walk. If the weather's even halfway decent that'll often stretch to an hour and a half.

Luckily, she tends to lie fairly dormant during the day, which gives me a chance to do other things, like gaming. Except mostly I'm more likely to be doing this instead; writing a blog post about the gaming I'm not doing. Then, in the evening she wakes up and wants attention, meaning I don't often get to do much else but play with her, feed her and walk her between tea and bedtime.

When Beryl crashes out around eight or nine in the evening, I tend to go to bed, too. It's earlier than I've ever gone to bed since I was a child. I could stay up (I'm a grown-up. I can stay up as late as I want.) but since I got my (Refurbished.) laptop I've found it too tempting to lie down in comfort and use it instead of sitting up at my desk. 

For most of the year that's meant a few hours spent working on AI-assisted songwriting but very recently I've swapped back to watching TV and... playing games. Partly because I had a gap in my schedule with the music-making on hiatus but mostly because I'm still using the stand-in desktop pending Black Friday, it occurred to me it might be worth doing a little experimenting to see just what games would run on the decidedly non-gaming laptop. I tried it back at the start of the year, when I was playing several titles via an external SDD, most notably Cloudpunk, but I'd not done much about it since.

One of the things that nudged me into trying again was the news that Amazon's withdrawal from the gaming sector had led to a rebranding of Prime Gaming. They sent me an "important update" about it. 

Before I read the email, my first thought was that they were going to close the gaming offer down altogether. Then I thought maybe they were just going to stop giving away free games. Eventually, it dawned on me I could stop guessing and just read the email.

It turned out to be good news. Instead of closing the whole thing down, it looks as though Amazon has slightly expanded its Prime offer. There will still be new games to claim every month and access to all previously-claimed games continues (Although the fact they even had to mention it suggests it isn't considered a permanent right, which hadn't really occurred to me.) 

I can see how we might lose access to the games that were playable only on Amazon's own gaming service, should that be terminated at some future date, but I hadn't considered that the titles claimed via GOG or Epic might also disappear. Not, I should make it clear, that there's any suggestion of that happening just now. But the phrasing does make me wonder about the long-term prospects for those libraries.

The bonus for Prime members is that now, instead of having access to a selection of games on Luna, Amazon's remote gaming streaming service, now we have full access to everything on the "Standard" package. Also Prime Gaming has been rebranded as Luna Gaming, effectively if not officially. All claims are now made through the Luna website.

It nudged me into wondering just how many games in my Prime Gaming library would be playable on the laptop. As I've often mentioned, sometimes satirically, there's always been a tendency for Prime to hand out some very old games. My laptop may not be capable of running much that's new but some of these Prime giveaways are virtually pre-historic!

I installed Prime/Luna and also Good Old Games and started trying a few out. I began with Lake, which I'd almost finished on the desktop, but the save files would appear to be held locally. I could transfer them, I'm sure, but it seemed like too much trouble, especially since I'm most likely only a session or two from the end.

I tried The Academy, Dungeon Rushers and Dark Envoy. They all ran perfectly but none of them grabbed me. Next, I looked at the huge quantity of point&click adventures I'd claimed, all of which, I'm sure, the laptop would handle easily, but nothing caught my fancy. I really wanted something combat-oriented and turn-based, like Dungeon of Naheulbeuk. 

Surprisingly, DoN has become my benchmark for turn-based RPGs. Well, I guess that would still be Baldur's Gate but it's a long time since I played any of that series The German spoof is a lot fresher in my mind. And so far I've had very little success finding anything that feels both similar and satisfying.

It was in that frame of mind that I was going through the list of games I'd claimed, well over two hundred of them, when I spotted a familiar title. Familiarish, anyway: Naheulbeuk's Dungeon Master. I'd completely forgotten about that one.

It's a standalone game set in the same dungeon as the original, featuring some of the same characters only instead of being an RPG, it's one of those management sims where you have to set up and maintain the dungeon so that NPCs can come in and do the adventuring. I've never really fancied that end of things, which seems like all the work for none of the glory or indeed the fun but I figured I might as well give it a go.

And it hooked me immediately. I've played every evening for the last few days, at least ninety minutes each time. There's a campaign storyline, which is where I chose to start, but there's also a sandbox version, which I'll very likely try after I lose the campaign.

I'm pretty sure I will lose it because I had no idea what I was doing for quite a while. The first two stories of my tower are a chaotic, muddled mess. The third, to which I've just gained access, is only any better because it's mostly empty still. I'm sure it'll be just as bad soon enough.

That I'm already considering my options for a second run through the campaign, and imagining what I might do in a sandbox setting, says everything that needs to be said about how enjoyable I'm finding the game. I'm not sure what it is about the Naheulbeuk series that works so well for me but clearly it's something.

That constitutes the main thrust of my gaming at the moment. Apart from NDM, the rest of my game-time of late has been limited to Overseer missions in EverQuest II and the occasional, short session in Blue Protocol: Star Resonance. 

I did manage to stay logged into EQII long enough during the Nights of the Dead holiday to collect the new craft books and buy my Necromancer all the petamorph wands she was missing from years past. There were a lot. I also had her buy the new, prestige house, which looks great and will be far more manageable than the vast, sprawling castle she supposedly lives in but which she barely ever visits. Now I just have to find time to move her stuff across and start decorating.

The very interesting-looking new scenario for Once Human has arrived, along with the oddly appropriate crossover event with Palworld. I'm keen to do something about both of those but there are several things stopping me and only one of them is personal inertia.

Even though I thought the stand-in computer wouldn't be able to run a big, flashy, new game like Once Human, I patched it up anyway and logged in to test the theory, which proved to be false. The game runs acceptably on the same graphic settings I've always used and better still if I turn them down just a notch. 

That means I can't use my old PC as an excuse for not playing. Another get-out clause would be that I'm holding back from trying out the new scenario because I'd need to swap characters. The one I'd been playing has finally found herself on a Permanent server and I am not about to move her after the time it's taken to get her onto one. I could either start over from scratch yet again or I guess I could move my original and best-equipped character to a server running the new scenario. Still thinking on it.

The real reason, though, is that I don't think I'll be able to find the time to progress any character very far. At most I might manage a bit of dabbling. That's about all I'm good for at the moment - dabbling.

I noticed Syp saying he was planning on focusing more on CRPGs and less on MMOs in the future. I find I'm no longer able to make that much of a distinction. Unless I stop and think about it, I'm not always even sure to what degree some of the games I'm playing are multiplayer or otherwise. What I do notice now is that the level of regular commitment required to make consistent and meaningful progress in a traditional MMORPG is often beyond me.

Of course, as this blog evidences, I've always been a dabbler and a dilettante by nature when it comes to gaming, be that on or offline, solo or multiplayer. I haven't undergone any kind of sea-change in attitude or approach. It's more that where I used to dabble at gaming for hour after hour, day after day, these days I just dabble at dabbling. 

Not that any of the above is enough to stop me adding yet more games I won't really play to the pile. Today's post was going to be about something else entirely. It was going to be a First Impressions piece about Duet Night Abyss, that not-a-gacha open-world RPG I said I probably wouldn't be playing. Except then I read a piece at MMOBomb where they said the story was quite good. They also made it sound as though there was a lot more to the game than just fighting, which made me think I ought to take a look at it after all.

I remembered DNA was on Steam, which always makes me more likely to give something a try. No wonder almost three-quarters of game developers feel Steam "has a monopoly on the PC games market." Unfortunately, when I went to the game's Store page to download it, I found a note saying "This game is not yet available on Steam". There's no release date, either.

I could download it from the game's own website but who knows if an account there will be transferable later and anyway I really do not want to be filling out another set of details. I'll wait until it comes to Steam, by which time, with a bit of luck, I'll also have a PC capable of playing it properly.

And that, I think, is likely to remain the state of play regarding my gaming for the immediate future. As soon as I do get a new machine, I intend to re-install New World and take a look at the very considerable amount of content I've missed. I'll also be playing the EQII expansion as soon as it arrives, whether or not I have a new machine to play  it on. If necessary, this one should cope well enough.

Whether any of these games, or any more I haven't thought of, will get enough play-time from me to make a lasting impression is another matter entirely. I don't see me freeing up much in the way of gaming-hours unless something quite unexpected happens. 

But then, none of us expected the pandemic, did we? So you never know. 

Property Liable To Flooding. Danger Of Turtles. Would Suit Adventurer Or Similar.

Yesterday's post started out as a double-feature - games I'm currently playing, co-starring EverQuest II and Once Human - but I ran on at such length about EQII I decided to cut Once Human out of the edit altogether. Just as well, really. I didn't have much to say about it.

I do have some screenshots, though. I take a lot of pictures in OH. It begs for it, what with all the gorgeous scenery and the plethora of odd and interesting details. Also, the in-game camera options are fairly easy to use and give very good results, which encourages scrapbooking if not actual photo-journalism.

The reason I don't have much to say about the game itslef, despite having played it a bunch of times recently, is only partly because I'm going through the same old content I've been through and written about several times already. Mainly it's because I've been spending most of my time building my house.

Once Human has excellent housing options although in common with far too many games they don't really begin to show their best side until you've invested a ton of points going down the various branches of the skill tree. That's not what it's called, by the way, but I'm not going to log in just to check the vernacular. We all know how these things work; no-one cares what the labels say.

Because you have to have done a lot of other, unrelated things to earn the points to spend on better materials and architectural features, there's an annoying tendency for all low-level housing to look like prefabricated boxes. I seem to recall this used to be called "ranch-style". That's if people even bother to put a roof on, of course. All too many players just slap down the foundations, place the utilities and leave it at that.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I had my house on a small plateau overlooking one of the starter towns, a location that was attractive enough to acquire several message markers from players suggesting it was a great spot to build a starter home. 

Once Human has an odd - I want to say unique because I can't recall seeing it anywhere before - feature, whereby you can craft a glowing spike to stick in the ground just about anywhere. Then you can append a message, saying anything you want. There seem to be very few restrictions on placing these; you can put them on other people's property or in towns, for example. You see them pretty much everywhere although not any longer in the ludicrous profusion of the weeks following launch, I'm pleased to say.

Initially I found them very annoying. They seemed like nothing but visual pollution and if you took the trouble to click on them and read what people had written they usually turned out to be verbal pollution as well. Most of them wouldn't even qualify as tagging. They didn't even have that much style. 

In my initial run, having been infuriated to find someone had placed one of the damn things inside my house, I searched through the settings until I found the option to switch them off completely. After that, for a long time, I never saw them at all and was very glad of it.

Sometime later, though, probably after I re-started in a new Scenario, I began seeing them again and for some reason I didn't immediately switch them off. Instead, I read a few and found that as the game had matured, so had the players. Some of them, anyway. They were leaving very helpful details on things like where to find gear chests or what strategies to use on instance bosses. The messages can include images and hyperlinks so some of them amounted to full strategy guides inside the game. 

Consequently, I didn't switch the feature off again and now I quite enjoy clicking on the little glowing sticks to see what stories they can tell. I was pleased to read all those confirmations of what a good spot I'd picked but puzzled as to why no-one had followed their own advice and built a home there. Didn't take me long to find out.

Although the site is extremely favorably placed for facilities and views, it's also altogether too close to a "stronghold", a term that seems to mean just about any permanent structure currently infested with deviants. There's a small, unnamed camp of them at the far end of the plateau - completely harmless, decent neighbors, keep themselves to themselves, always ready to lend a cup of sugar provided you put a couple of bullets into them before you ask, that sort of thing - but the mere presence of the buildings they occupy hinders development in that direction and completely prevents expansion.

I found that out when I spent the necessary points to expand my territory only to find the machine wouldn't pony up the extra floor space. As it happened, I'd just received the nod to move on to the third town, Meyer's Market, so I figured I might as well move my whole operation down there.

You can just pick up your entire house with all the fittings, pop it in your bags and flip it out again where you want it to be. I thought about doing that but my house, if you could even call it that, was a mess so I thought it might be better if I just started again from scratch. Building in Once Human is both easy and fun so I was looking forward to it.

And it went really well. I found an excellent spot, also recommended by a previous resident, completely flat, on a large sandbank in the river next to the town. I put down my terminal, claimed the jumbo-sized plot.and started building. At the start pretty much all you need is to build is wood and gravel and there was no shortage of nodes for those right outside, so I started mining and chopping until I couldn't carry any more and then I turned to building.

After two or three sessions doing not much else I had the biggest, most sensibly laid-out house I've had in the game to date. It still looks like a box but it's a well-proportioned box with big, open rooms and high ceilings with plenty of light coming in through the numerous windows and skylights. It isn't much to look at from the outside but the interior has huge potential. I'm very happy with how it's going so far.

I'm not so happy with all the snapping turtles that keep wandering in from the river. They're no threat but they're highly aggressive and when one attacks it makes my character jump back about a yard, which in turn sometimes makes me jump, if I'm not expecting it. I may have to build a fence all around the property to keep them out.

I was enjoying building so much, I went out and did a bunch of missions to level up and get more points to spend in the housing tree. I could now build a much more impressive-looking structure in  stone instead of wood but that would mean going to higher-level areas to mine resources and doing more missions to get more points to open up the recipes for more sophisticated equipment...

And that's how they get you. Not that I'm complaining. It's very entertaining. The only shadow of doubt I have about carrying on down this path is whether the Novice server I'm on is eligible for permanent status, when the current scenario ends. I'm not at all sure the starter servers are included in that program.

And anyway, I want to set up my forever home in the game on one of the servers that has the full map open all the time, north and south. That's going to necessitate a move at some point so there's probably not much point my getting too invested in the server I'm on.

That's what I've been up to in Once Human. I said it wasn't anything new. But it's been a lot of fun. Sometimes more of the same is just what I want.

Nuts To This!

A couple of days ago, I mentioned I was downloading the demo for an open-world survival game called Squirreled Away. I said I might write a post about it, after I'd played it. Well, now I have and now I am.

Not that I have an awful lot to say about the demo or the game. It's pretty much what I expected from a light-hearted survival title, where you play as a squirrel. All the usual survival mechanics are in place and they feel there or thereabouts as compulsive as they always do. 

The reverse is also true. I very much doubt, if you've found it easy to resist the attractions of the genre until now, this is going to be the game that changes your mind. I wouldn't say the demo feels by the numbers but equally it's not out to shake up anyone's expectations. It's a good introduction to a game that looks like it was primarily designed to give the punters what they want.

I certainly enjoyed my seventy-six minutes, split across two sessions. If I was looking for a new survival game I might well have followed through and bought it, not least because it looks to be good value. The full game is only $14.99 (£12.99 for me.), which sounds like a very fair price. As it is, I'm not in the market for a new survival game just now and if I was I'd be more likely go for Dragonwilds even at twice the price but as a demo, this one does the job.

And the demo, which obviously is free, makes for a fun little diversion in its own right. If you wanted to get into the building elements, you might squeeze a few hours out of it. 

Mostly, though, it's the tutorial island, where you learn the basics by way of half a dozen quests, given to you by your fellow squirrels, all of whom have weirdly human names. They also all have problems only you, a complete stranger, can solve. Isn't that always the way?

The best thing about the game from my perspective was the movement, which felt fluid, intuitive and entertaining in and of itself. Your squirrel (Now I come to think about it, I'm not sure he/she/they even has a name...) bounds around in convincingly squirrely fashion, running up trees as though gravity doesn't exist. 

Actually, gravity barely does exist. There's no falling damage and you can't fall off a tree unless you press Ctrl first.

You can also swim, although it requires endurance that runs out very quickly, preventing you from swimming across the lake from the all-animal island to the enticing shoreline opposite, where the humans live. You can't even swim to the next island but fortunately there's a friendly turtle with nothing better to do than ferry curious squirrels from one island to the other and back again.

At least, he's willing once you've proved your community credentials by helping all those aforementioned squirrels with their fallen-down houses and such. "No freeloaders", that's Terry the Turtle's motto. (It's not, by the way.I just made it up. He's much friendlier than that.)

One of the squirrels, Maya, teaches you how to meditate. It would have to be Maya, wouldn't it? Not Claire, Mike or Sam. Meditation is how you learn crafting recipes, which might seem odd but you can't really argue with it. How do you imagine a squirrel would learn to make an axe out of a stick, a pebble and some resin they found up a tree? Meditation seems like as good an explanation as any.

My first session, I played for fifty minutes, doing exactly what you'd expect. I scampered around, picking up sticks and pebbles. I climbed trees to get resin. I collected strawberries and nuts to snack on because Squirreled Away is a survival game and you do have to eat. Although not, as far as I can see, drink or sleep, at least not in the demo.

When I had enough, I made my axe and my pickax and ran around chopping up bigger twigs for more sticks and breaking up bigger rocks for more pebbles. I learned how to find and fill a cache, which is where the squirrels keep their nuts, among other things. 

I helped all my new squirrel pals and ticked off all my quests so Terry the Turtle would ferry me to the next island and then when he was ready to take me, I wasn't quite ready to go. I still had a Golden Acorn to find. As well as leading the guided meditations, Maya also minds the mystic circle of pillars where, if you can find and place all five Golden Acorns, a ghostly blue squirrel appears and gives you a permanent buff that gives you more stamina.

I didn't want to miss out on that so I carried on looking. I had four but the fifth eluded me, even though the pillars themselves give some hefty hints. In the end I found the missing acorn at the bottom of a hollow log. Then I hopped onto Terry's shell and off we went.

I had some minor issues with the UI, particularly when it came to building, which felt fiddlier than it does in many games, but there's one very useful function I really liked. If you hold down RMB, the screen fades and the names of every creature in a very wide area appears, along with a headshot that lets you know what species they are and a distance, measured in Paws, that tells you how near or far they are.

I found it very handy but when I jumped off Terry's back onto the sand and turned it on to see what was waiting for me, I was a little overwhelmed by the sheer number of options. The second island was clearly going to be a lot busier than the first.

It was getting late, so I decided to leave exploring the new place for another day. It looked like the demo was going to be one of those really lengthy ones you can play for several hours without repeating yourself.

It wasn't, not really. Most of the second island turned out to be cordoned off by an impenetrable grid. I could see all the new squirrels waving at me, no doubt desperate for me to come and help them with stuff they ought to have been able to do for themselves, but I couldn't get to any of them.

As far as I can tell, there's only one reason the demo lets you go to the second island at all and that's so you can try out the housing. Okay, I guess it also whets your appetite for what you could be doing if you bought the full game - all those juicy exclamation marks with their as-yet unknown quests - but you're obviously really there to give housing a go.

And the housing offer looks pretty solid. An embarrassingly-named seagull called Lotta Land fills you in on the details although it's all very straightforward. I was able to knock up a nice little shack with a roof and a balcony and somewhere to place my bed in about a quarter of an hour this morning. Construction required nothing but sticks, which made it pleasantly simple to get started. I assume there's more complexity later.

I admit I'm a little curious to see for myself. As I've said before, these days I find the early stages of survival games at least as addictive as I once found classic MMORPG starting areas. Both are pleasures in themselves, regardless of whether you  go on to play the games seriously, which means the fun never seems to wear thin. I spent the best part of two decades very contentedly replaying what was effectively the same content in scores of different MMORPGs, not to mention multiple runs in the same ones, and now it seems likely I'll do the same in dozens of open-world survival games.

Whether I'll want to do it as squirrel is another question. Even though I generally enjoy playing anthropomorphic animals even more than I like playing humanoids, this particular quadruped didn't immediately catch my fancy. It felt a bit characterless, hardly surprising given there's no character creation. You're just a squirrel and that's that.

If you've ever fantasized about becoming a tool-using squirrel, though, this is your game.

These Fragments...

I have absolutely nothing to write about today because I've been spending every waking minute fiddling around with old cassette tapes and turning the songs I've been hearing inside my head for the last forty or fifty years into ones I can hear outside my head as well. Obviously that's more fun than just about anything but even so I don't want to drop cadence here, so I'd better come up with something.

I was going to do a few hundred words on the Steam Spring Sale and Blizzard's latest press release on how WoW Housing is going to work. Only a couple of problems with that plan, the first of which being I haven't actually looked at the sale yet. The only reason I even know it's on is because I have Pantheon on my wishlist so I got an email telling me it's 20% off right now.

And that is tempting. I'm still curious enough to want to have a poke about and I doubt there'll be any bigger discounts for a while. The whole Early Access thing seems to be working quite well for them. They don't need to give away the farm just yet.

At 20% off the game is £26.80, which isn't nothing but also isn't much of anything, either. I'd pay it. As usual, the main issue for me isn't "Is it worth it?" but "Will I play it?" Realistically, the answer to that is, "Probably not" so I'm holding off for now. The sale has almost a week to go so I don't have to decide right away.

As for the housing in World of Warcraft, the problem there is that I can't really say much about it  because I haven't even watched the video. There is a video, isn't there? Erm... no, not really. I just checked and there are a bunch of video examples in the PR piece but no actual video as such.

What the piece does have is a lot of detail on things like how you can push a chair through a wall and if you put a cup on a table you can pick them both up and move them about together. Too much detail, really. I'm more interested in how you get a house, how much choice there is and whether I'll be able to have one on the Endless Free Trial.

Maybe that's in the press release too. I probably should have read the whole thing before I started this.

Anyway, those were the only two things I had in mind to write about today and clearly I wasn't in much of a position to do either of them justice. Then, right before I was going to do it anyway, Wilhelm put up a Friday Bullet Point post in which he talked about both, so it seemed a bit redundant for me to start going on about them too, especially since, as I said, I haven't even done the reading.

Still, I got eight paragraphs out of it anyway. Can't complain.

Instead, I'm going to rip through this month's Prime Gaming offers. And by "rip" I really mean rip off. I read them at the start of the month and didn't think they were worth mentioning but I lookedagain a few days ago and thought maybe they were, after all. Now I don't have anything better to write about, I'm sure of it!

The full list - and there's a lot - is on the Prime Gaming Blog as usual. I'm just going to mention a few that caught my eye.

Syberia: The World Before - I think this might be the last, remaining Syberia game Prime haven't already given us. I claimed all the others but I only played the first. I found it very heavy going. The series has a strong reputation in the Point & Click genre but it seemed to be right at the ponderous, do everything the hard way for the sake of it end of the spectrum to me. Maybe this one will be a bit more... dare I say fun? I'm taking it, anyway. May as well collect the set.

Naheulbeuk's Dungeon Master - I really enjoyed the original game. And the DLC. I'd love another, full campaign. Unfortunately, this is one of those sims where you play the baddie trying to kill the adventurers with your fiendish traps and hordes of minions. I was about to say that thoses aren't really my cup of tea but then it occured to me I've never actually played one. Who knows? I might enjoy it. I'll be taking that one, too and I'll almost certainly play it, although not just yet.

Dog Shelter Simulator - This one jumped out as something I might like to play. Mrs Bhagpuss and I watch our share of dog rescue vodcasts. Then I read the description, which makes it sound more like work than a game. I think that about most simulations but in this case, what with the stress of all those dogs you can't find homes for, it doesn't just sound like work but anxiety-inducing, distressing work at that. Pass.

Endling: Extinction Is Forever - Then again, running an imaginary dog shelter would be a delight compared to this nightmare. "Experience what life would be like in a world ravaged by mankind through the eyes of the last fox on Earth... defend your cubs, three tiny and defenseless fur balls... plan your next movement carefully since it could be the last for you and your pups." It also goes on about how you can get to know their personalities before the inevitable strikes, which reminded me of that old T-shirt that said "Join the Army. Meet interesting people. Then kill them." It's a bit annoying, how bleak it sounds. The graphics are gorgeous. It would make a great cozy adventure game but instead it looks more like a nihilistic horrorshow. Who enjoys this kind of existential torture? The Countryside Alliance, I assume. Fun for people who hate foxes, I guess. My grandmother would have loved it. She really hated foxes.

Saints Row: Remastered -  I quite fancy having a go at this. I've read enough about it over the years. I think it would be good for doing that thing I liked so much in Once Human, namely driving about aimlessly while listening to the radio. Pretty sure that's a thing you can do in Saints Row. Not sure about the rest of it but that alonw makes it worth grabbing.

There were also a couple of Old West/Wild West titles. I'm usually up for anything with that setting so I was briefly excited, until I took a closer look. 

El Hijo - Looks great but turns out to be "a non-violent stealth game". And the protagonist is a child. Doesn't exactly scream "Classic Western", does it?

Colt Canyon - Thematically far more in line with expectations but it's "a 2D pixel art shooter" and the screenshots make it look almost abstract. I might give it a try - it's available for another twelve days - but I honestly can't see myself playing it so I suppose I ought to be sensible and leave it on the shelf.

And that's about it. Thin fare, I know, by which I mean this post, not Prime's March slate, which isn't at all bad. Normal service will be resumed when I've exhausted my pop star fantasies, something that isn't likely to happen for a while yet.

Games, Music, TV, Books... It Must Be The Grab-Bag!

Today, I believe we shall have a grab-bag of various odds and ends. Even though it is Thursday. Because tomorrow I believe we shall have a music post and on the weekend we shall have nothing at all. Because I have to work.

So, let us see what is in the bag. 

Oh, look! Surprise, surprise! Another email from Playable Worlds! It must be a day ending in "y".And what do they have to tell us this time? Something new and unexpected!

Painting The Galaxy Red

It seems Stars Reach has a story. Who knew? Seriously, though. Anyone?

I mean, they have been putting out those really rather quite good short stories on the website while pretty much telling no-one they were doing it but other than that I'm not sure we've heard anything about any lore underpinning the game.

It's an exaggeration to say there's a story. And after all, the game doesn't need one. Raph is very keen to let everyone know Stars Reach is a "true sandbox". Apparently, though, there is some lore behind it all. Well, a paragraph, at least:

"You are one of 8 kinds of humans who have destroyed their homeworlds. Thanks to the TransPlanetary League, a government formed by the eight types of humanity, you have been given a second chance to leave your homeworld behind to head out into the larger galaxy. They’ll hand you a simple blaster, starter tools, and basic training before letting you loose to make a new life among the stars."

There you go. Now you know.  You're basically the scum of the galaxy, one of the surviving members of a bunch of losers who somehow managed to fuck up their own planets so badly they can't live there any more. Now the whole gang of environmental criminals has come together to spread their incompetence and destruction far and wide across the entire galaxy. 

It's not what I'd call an inspiring start. It's dangerously close to "Colonialization: the Space Sim". I was particularly unimpressed to learn that the first and presumably most important item the authorities issue you with is a gun. Get out there, kill anything that gets in your way, take their stuff. Pretty much Colonialism 101, isn't it? 

I'm not sure PW is reading the room here. This sort of stuff isn't going down too well in certain circles just now but it's too popular altogether in others. Which side do you want to be on? 

Less controversially but equally surprisingly, there's a whole lot more in the email about stuff that's not in the pre-alpha. Things like character stats (There are nine of them, apparently.) and quests (There will be some and you'll be able to make your own, too.). There's also a map of the galaxy although it's unclear if it's just an indication of how things will work in general or a specific, accurate map of all the locations that are going to be in the game. 

There's even a flow-chart of what you can do in Stars Reach. Or more accurately will be able to do when it's there. It's mostly not there now, I'm fairly sure...

One thing that did catch my attention was this: 

"A planet is a zone. A part of space is a zone. Zones are connected by wormholes." 

I guess that pretty much puts paid to the idea of spaceships. It's going to be old-school zoning, albeit dressed up as going through "wormholes", I guess. Which is what we're seeing in pre-alpha, minus the wormholes part.

Why Call Her Back From Heaven?

There's going to be a Buffy reboot and Sarah Michelle Gellar is going to be in it!

Really good news. If it ever happens. It's kind of a long way out still but getting closer all the time.

According to Variety, the project is currently "nearing a pilot order" with Hulu, which I think means that someone might be about to green-light a pilot that might get picked up for a series. Sarah Michelle Gellar is also "in final talks" to star in it, so that's not even a certainty, either. 

If it ever happens, it sounds like they have a solid framework, anyway. SMG (Weird acronym...) would appear as a "recurring character" in a mentor role to a new Slayer, which I guess makes her the reboot's Giles. There is the small problem of the way the original series ended, which was with hundreds - maybe thousands - of Slayers appearing across the world but I'm sure that's easily solvable with magic.

The new show, if it comes, will be directed by the Oscar-winning Chloé Zhao. The Zuckerman sisters will write and act as showrunners and Dolly Parton is signed up as Executive Producer, as she was for the original. If they can't get commissioned with a team like that then the money-men really do know nothing.

I'm optimistic but of course, even if it goes ahead, it'll be a looooong wait.

When She's On Her Way To Hell

Sabrina, that is. Sadly, I don't have news of a Chilling Adventures reboot but I am here to recommend Sarah Rees Brennan's trilogy of novelizations of the TV show. I got the set for Christmas, I've just finished the third book and they're all excellent.

Novelizations of TV shows and movies are often so much better than they need to be but these are really outstanding. Not only are they very well-written indeed, they're beautifully designed and packaged as a set. If we had them at work, which of course we don't because we never have the books I want to read, they'd make an excellent display.

The most impressive thing about the trilogy, though, is the way it adds insight into what you see and hear in the show itself. One thing novels handle much better than television or the movies is interior monologue and there's often plenty of that in novelizations but SRB (Much better.) goes well beyond the normal "here's what they were thinking in that scene you remember". 

The three books all employ a different technique and within each there are several more. Only Sabrina ever gives her thoughts in first person but in one of the volumes all the characters' thoughts are represented in idiosyncratic mental registers that sometimes align with but more often diverge from what's shown in the series.

It was so well-done that at first I thought it was being done badly. I felt the author was contradicting both the canonical content of the show and her own, earlier interpretation. As I read on, though, I began to realize she was doing something much more subtle and clever - allowing us to hear not just the private thoughts of the characters but to hear those thoughts from each character's own, unmediated perspective, something often quite different from the way the character wants others to perceive them.

It's a damn good trick if you can pull it off and Brennan very much can. Unfortunately, the trick she apparently couldn't manage was to get the publishers (Scholastic, possibly the last publisher you'd expect to publish a book with a dedication from the author that literally ends with "Hail Satan".) to stump up for more than three books once the series got canned, so the third book ends right in the middle of a tale now most unlikely ever to be told. 

The upshot of all of this is that I really, really want to re-watch the entire series again and also that I'm now extremely likely to read anything else by Sarah Rees Brennan I can get my hands on. She's written some original fantasy but she seems to specialize in novelizations of YA supernatural series. I'm going to have to get hold of her Shadowhunters and WINX adaptations, one of which was published under the name Ava Corrigan for some reason, although she can't have been more uncomfortable being known as the author of a WINX spin-off as I will be if anyone asks me what I'm reading, when I'm reading it in the lunch room at work.

Also, I need to read the comic-book continuation of Chilling Adventures, which was brutally curtailed at the end of Season 4 by the evil Netflix, that ultimate villain no televised hero can ever defeat. The continued adventures of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in comic-book form after the series ended were absolutely top-notch so, once again, I'm optimistic.

Home Is The Hunter

Blizzard is finally getting around to adding housing to World of Warcraft and Grimtooth of Not All Hunters is feeling ambivalent about it. So would I be, if I could be bothered feeling anything at all.

It's a mark of how far I've drifted from the anchor that held me to the MMORPG scene for so long that I haven't even felt a momentary urge to revisit Guild Wars 2 to see what the housing there is like. Now I find I don't feel much more inclined to revisit WoW to check out the accommodation there, either.

Of course, at the moment there's nothing to see. Not even a prototype. Some artist's impressions, like the architect's models you see in the showrooms of house-builders, and that's all.

We do have some idea now of what Blizzard intends, though, and I have to say it doesn't look at all bad. MassivelyOP reported yesterday on what they're calling "the design pillars for World of Warcraft's accessible neighborhood housing". It's an encouraging document, including as it does "Boundless Self-Expression" as the first and foremost pillar. I think that means decorating. If so, I'm all for it.

The second pillar, "Deeply Social", interests me not at all but the third, "Long-Lasting Journey" is welcome news. At least, it is as far as it goes, which isn't nearly far enough. 

Despite calling it "an evergreen addition to the game", the timescales to which the press release alludes - "multiple patches and into future expansions" - don't feel as reassuring as they should. Once you add housing, it needs to be there for the lifetime of the game. If not, don't bother.

Grimtooth's take on all this is interesting since it focuses not on the housing players are going to see but on the cost to Blizzard of adding it to the game, particularly in terms of server load. I've rarely seen anyone even mention this side of the housing issue before and I've certainly never thought much about it myself. 

Maybe it explains why Yoshi P. always seems so reluctant to give every Final Fantasy XIV player free access to the housing they want. I always thought that was to create artificial scarcity and thereby instill FOMO but maybe it's more like fear of drowning the rest of the game in housing-induced lag.

Just about every other MMORPG manages to provide housing of one sort or another, though, so I'm sure Blizzard can do it. I don't imagine I'll care enough to re-sub but if there's a shack or a hut going for players on the Endless Free Trial then I'll be happy to grab mine. I'm guessing that won't be until next year but who knows? It is in the Roadmap for 2025, I believe.

And that'll do for now. As always, let's finish with a song, even if we're getting a whole post full of them tomorrow.

Woman Driver - The Pill

There are two bands (At least.) called The Pill. This is the one I like. They remind me of Shampoo, a bit, as well as a certain other band from the same place they come from, the Isle of Wight. You know who I mean.

We might have another from them tomorrow.

 

Notes on AI used in this post.

Just the header image but the process was interesting. I wanted to use a composite shot of Buffy and Sabrina. I could have found a couple of pictures and photo-shoppped them together myself but I'd been at this for a while and I was in a hurry so I googled for one someone else had done. I found a good one but then I started to get uncomfortable about just pinching it so I thought I'd mess around with it and make the provenance a bit less obvious.

I ran it through a couple of filters in Paint.net, trimmed it a bit, removed all the text and finally re-rendered it as an ink sketch. It looked good but still altogether too much like the original, so I had the bright idea of laundering it through AI. I uploaded the image to NightCafe and let Flux Schnell have a run at it with the prompt "Movie poster, technicolor, widescreen, 1950s"

At the default settings, that produced something utterly unrecognizable, as if the AI had completely ignored the uploaded image altogether. I pushed the Noise Weight slider all the way back to zero to make the model stick rigidly to the starting image and that gave me the version above. About all it seems to have done is make Buffy's face a little harder and add a night scene with a car in the deep background, which I rather like.

The interesting part about all this to me is what it does or doesn't do to the ownership of the image and the rights that adhere to it. The picture I started with came from YouTube and was almost certainly constructed from other images from elsewhere on the web, presumably culled directly from the shows' PR materials. The image at the top of this post is an AI-generated interpretation of an algorithmically produced "sketch" based on a modified copy of a screen-grab from YouTube, taken using the Screenshot facility provided by YouTube itself. 

I'm not sure that's any cleaner, morally or legally, than just stealing the image would have been in the first place, although as far as I understand it, as an AI image it now can't be legally claimed by anyone. I'll credit the creator anyway. It's a channel called Doing OK.