So Much To Do Before I Can Do Anything

As promised, I downloaded New World Aeternum yesterday evening but I only had time to log in and make sure it was working before it was time to stop. I logged in one of my lower-level characters and ran her around a little just to see how the new PC handled things. 

It seemed okay, although there was that familiar hiatus at the start, where the textures load in sperately and very slowly, making the whole world look like it's either floating in space or flooded. It often used to do that on the old machine so I'm not reading anything into it. 

There were some hitches and stuttering that might have concerned me more had the conection to the East Coast server cluster where I have always played not been so awful. Given Amazon's pre-eminent position in the server rental business, I'm a bit surprised by just how bad it was. 

It was even worse today. Then again, I am on Virgin Media Broadband, which isn't all that impressive at the best of times, and recently it's been worse even than usual, so once again I don't think the issues I'm seeing necessarily have anything to do with my new set-up. I might have to swap to an EU server. It looks like you can chop and change at will now.

If you factor out those two elements - poor connectivity and New World's inherent flakiness, the new rig is handling things very well. Once the textures had loaded and whenever my ping was decent everything felt very smooth on High graphic settings. The game looked gorgeous as always and everything behaved just as it should.

This morning I downloaded EverQuest II, expecting it to be equally satisfactory, especially seeing as how it ran perfectly well even on the very old machine. Things didn't go quite as well. 

First off, a new installation of EQII these days defaults to the streaming system introduced a long time ago, whereby each new area only downloads as and when you enter it. That sounds great in theory but even with a fast connection it's a total pain when you experience it in action. 

It's not even zone by zone. It's individual areas within zones. Possibly every separate Point of Interest, of which there are thousands. Imagine the old loading times for zones fifteen years ago. If you liked waiting for those, you'll love how long this takes!

I was fed up of it by the time I'd sat through separate downloads for Character Select, my Mara house and East Freeport. I logged out and googled "EQ2 Full Download", which turned out to be harder to find than you'd expect.

In case anyone is likely to need it, I'll point you right now to the excellent Wiki page on Installation. That was where I learned that to download the whole game before you try to play it you have to open Advanced Tools from the tiny cog icon on the launcher and then click on the "Select Game Version" button. I had already thought of the Advanced Tools part all on my own but once I got there I couldn't see anything that looked like it was relevant. I certainly wasn't thinking of a download as a different version of the game.

When I got that started, I was impressed by how fast it was. The current EQII footprint is surprisingly small at just under 33GB and it took maybe fifteen minutes to get the whole thing onto my external drive via a usb cable. 

With everything already there, zoning times were hugely reduced. Very noticeably faster, in fact, than I've been used to on the old system. Big pat on the case for the new computer there.

What was less impressive were the graphics, which looked just awful. Digging into the Options showed me it had defaulted to Extreme Performance. I changed that to High Quality and things looked much better but there was a lot of hitching and juddering, none of which I ever had with the old machines. 

Once again, the Installation guide was very helpful. Apparently even now the game is optimized for single-core CPUs and has very limited support for the multiple cores newer games take for granted. My old machine did have multiple cores - four, I think - and the very old one had just two. I never even thought about it in respect to EQII though. The new one has six cores and twelve threads and apparently that's enough to confuse the poor old thing.

The wiki suggests using a "lower core index value" which is a setting in Options I'd never even noticed. Then again, it also says that's for Intel processors. It doesn't mention AMD, which is what mine is. Still, I thought I'd try it, so I shifted the slider back from 31 to 6. I have no idea what that even means but it seemed to make a big difference. The game is now running just as it did on the older machines.

EQII has always been a nightmare to optimize for graphic performance, though. There's a lengthy guide on how to do it stickied on the legacy forums. It goes back a few years - well, to the launch of the game in 2004 in fact, although it was updated in... er... 2014. I don't know how relevant it is any more but I might have a look at it if I run into any more graphic or performance problems.

Once again, it does appear that the main issues I'm likely to experience are going to have more to do with outside factors than any shortcomings of my new PC. Like, for example, the supremely irritating re-discovery that all the UI and character settings I'm used to in EQII are held client side not on the server. I'm going to have to set up my old PC again just to copy the .ini files onto a USB stick so I can transfer them to the new machine. Ah well. It's not like I haven't done that before...

While I was on the EQII website initiating the download, I remembered I hadn't yet gotten around to pre-ordering the new expansion, Rage of Churros Churrath. I have now. It was already very cheap at £25.12 (Nitpickingly accurate currency conversion there, I notice.) but as an All Access member I get a ten per cent discount, so it actually cost me just £22.61. And there's a level 130 Character Boost included, which I will happily use on one of my Level 125s.

Once I had all that sorted out, I went back to New World and played for about forty minutes. I logged in my original character, currently Level 60, and did the quest that gets you your first mount. It was easy and fun and now I have a horse called Moonshadow. My plan this afternoon was to post about that but things seem to have gotten away from me as usual so I'll save it for another day.

What I will say is that just a few minutes back in the world reminded me what an enjoyable game New World is and always was. I know it's often (Usually...) been quite buggy but honestly, if an MMORPG with as much going for it as New World hasn't been able to generate enough consistent and reliable interest among gamers to turn it into a profitable, long-term concern then I'm starting to doubt such a thing is even possible any more.

And that would be a really great lead-in to a rant about what's happening with Ashes of Creation right now. But once again, I'll save that for another post. I'll be pissed if I don't get a free pass into Early Access, though, I'll tell you that for nothing! (Edit: Apparently I do so just ignore me...)

A Quick Technical Update

There wouldn't normally be a post here on a Sunday because for me that's always a work day. Except when I'm on holiday. Which I am. 

But there still wasn't going to be a post today because a) I had two separate things to do in two other towns and b) when I got back I had my new computer to set up. 

There wasn't an awful lot to it. I bought an off-the-shelf machine from Dr. Memory via Amazon, where I paid less for it than that link shows. Either way, it's the cheapest "gaming computer" they do. It wouldn't qualify as any kind of gaming machine by most gamers' standards but these days I don't really qualify as much of a gamer, either.

It's a curious device. It has one of those new-fangled CPUs with its own graphics chip. It's alleged to be able to run modern games on its own and there are YouTube videos and benchmarks to suggest that, if you're not all that fussy about framerates and resolutions, it pretty much can. 

That's nice but I already have a halfway-decent graphics card that I paid nearly as much for a couple of years ago as I just paid for this computer, so I checked before buying it that the motherboard would accept it, that it would fit in the case, that the PSU could cope with it and that it wouldn't clash with the CPU graphics. 

All of that, so far, seems to be true. It was a bit of task getting it set up because the clever people who put the thing together hid all the internal power connectors so tidily away I thought for a while there weren't any. Once I'd found where they'd hidden them, though, it was all quite straigtforward.

Everything seems to be working now but because I always like to treat every new PC as a complete fresh start and never allow it to sync with any of my old ones, the next few days (And weeks.) are going to involve a lot of downloading stuff and signing in to accounts. 

The idea is that by doing it that way, the new machine will only have stuff on it that I actually still use, not ten years of kipple and clutter. It's a really annoying process and the "clean machine" era won't last long but it will at least give me breathing space for a while.

I do have some stuff on external drives I can connect via USB, so that will save some time. I've been playing games on those for a few years now and I can't tell any difference in performance from the ones I have installed on internal drives. 

I have a few Steam games immediately available that way, including Blue Protocol: Star Resonance, but right now, I'm downloading New World: Aeternum. That should make for a good test of how well the new PC performs. I really want to give it another try anyway, now they made all the content available for free.

When I get everything running how I like it, I'll probably report back on how well it's going. It'll be interesting to see how viable it is to play the games I play on a really cheap-ass rig. 

And that's all for now, I think.

Back to the downloading. 

In The Night Cafe

In the "AI Used In This Post" footnote I include with every post that uses any form of generative AI (Well, when I remember...) I almost always mention NightCafe. I can't remember when I first found the website but it must have been at least a couple of years ago and since then I've rarely gone anywhere else for my AI image needs.

AAM XL Anime Mix v1

Until today, when I did a bit of googling in support of this post, I had no idea NightCafe was an Australian operation. I also didn't know it had a mission statement: "to democratise art creation". The site's "About" page is worth a read. I won't paraphrase it here because it's a two-minute read but I recommend a click-through.  

I'm currently reading Supremacy by Parmy Olsen, which tells the story behind the development of the biggest of the Western AI developers, Deep Mind and OpenAI. I'm not far into the book yet (It's my bathroom book so I'm reading it a few pages at a time.) but the most surprising thing to me so far is the extent to which the individuals who started all of this had existential, humanitarian and even altruistic reasons for doing so.

I believe part of Parmy Olsen's purpose in writing the book was to show how those lofty goals became subverted by capitalism but I won't pre-empt the twist ending. I mention it mostly as a corollary to the brief description of Angus Russell's flash of inspiration for NightCafe, which was when a friend came round to his apartment and commented on how bare it looked with no pictures on the wall.

Nightmare Shaper v3

Somehow that led Angus to start a crusade to "allow anyone - regardless of skill level - to experience the satisfaction, the therapy, the rush of creating incredible, unique art." I'll pass over the inevitable argument that kind of statement is bound to start because this - believe it or not - isn't a post about the rights or wrongs of generative AI.

No, this is just another gamer's blog post where someone tells you how they've been grinding and now they've leveled up. Or something. 

Since I started using it, NightCafe has become increasingly gamified. There was always a log-in daily where you got five credits just for visiting the site each day, and there have been competitions running for as long as I can remember, none of which I have paid even the slightest passing attention.

A few weeks ago the administrators (Probably Angus's wife, who's the  Chief Operating Officer.) decided to turn that daily log-in into something a little more active, so now you have to make a picture before you get your free credits. It's a good deal because the minimum payout is still five creds but now there's a dice-roll to see how much more you get on top of that and on a good day you might get ten or fifteen.

DALL-E 3

Better yet, there are streaks. Every five days gets you a bonus ten credits and after a certain number of days you get an extra bonus and a title. I'm an Owl, which comes at thirty days. Next comes Horse at a hundred, then Bear at two hundred and Eagle after a full year.

I'd be further along but I missed a day because for some reason, one day I didn't get the email reminder. Until then, it had never failed to appear in all the time I'd been using the site. Now I take great care to check in every morning, email or no, because the penalty for missing a day is to slide all the way back down the snake to the start.

Not that it matters. The credits keep rolling in just the same and what difference does it make whether you're an Owl or an Eagle? Except it will matter to someone because there's a Leaderboard. 

I didn't know until today there was such a thing. Now I do, I still find it hard to believe. Who makes a leaderboard for a utility website? What would be going in someone's head to do a thing like that? 

Ideogram V3 Turbo

Top of the table today is Amelezz with a "1.2k day" streak, which suggests the streak thing has been going on a lot longer than I thought. If not for that one slip, I might be somewhere on that leaderboard. I doubt I missed many days since I first discovered the site, if any at all, and that has to be at least a couple of years ago..

But even then, my name still wouldn't show up on the board because I have never registered an account under any name. I must have filled in some form long ago or else how would they know where to send the emails but it doesn't seem to have required anything more than the address because my creations are all still accredited to "Anonymous User". 

Unlike Suno, which has a similar pattern of gamification and where I'm unknown as That Darn Cat, no-one is going to find anything I've done by searching Nightcafe. Mind you, they won't find much at Suno either, only the experiments I made when I first found the app, also a couple of years ago. All my recent work there remains resolutely private.

Google Imagen 4.0 Ultra

I am not tempted by leaderboards or likes and I am not a fan of gamification. In fact, I'm against it. When the new system was introduced I was irked. 

I could just have ignored it and stopped collecting the credits. I already had plenty, getting on for three thousand, and since I only use a handful every few weeks, whenever I need something for a post, I was hardly likely to run out.

I wasn't so angry I was going to do myself out of a free supply of credits just on principle, though, so I contented myself with some passive-aggressive push-back. I decided I wouldn't give NightCafe the satisfaction of seeing any new prompts from me to earn those credits. Instead, I'd re-use the exact same prompt every day.

For the first day of the new regime I pulled up one of the images I'd used for this post, which at the time was the most recent use I'd made of the app. I cut and pasted the prompt - "Walking through corn fields Covered in dust Lost in this dustbowl young female figure, old, worn clothing, line art, color, retro-futurism" - to generate a new image and that's the prompt I've been using every day since.

Fluently XL

The whole point of NightCafe, as opposed to other AI Image Generation sites, is that it collects together many, many models. The Pro version, for which you have to pay, has the most but even the free version has around sixty. 

At the start of my streak I just used whatever model I'd left in the chamber after the last time I visited but pretty quickly it occurred to me to try a different model each day. Had I been planning it, I'd have started at the top and worked down but as it is I've just been picking one on a whim and trying not to duplicate too much. At some point, I need to go back and note down all the ones I've used so I can make sure to try all the others.

It's been fascinating. The similarity of the images is striking but so are the differences. As of today I have forty-seven images from the same prompt which, you'll notice, does not mention anything about the way the figure should be facing, their ethnicity, the time of day or what exactly I mean by a "corn field".

All of these and many more are details left to the AIs to work out. It's very instructive to watch them doing it. 

Mysterious XL v4

In so far as it's possible to tell, all the women are white, often typically northern-European in appearance. There are one or two where it's slightly ambiguous but there are no dark-skinned faces and most of the clothing is broadly western in style. 

That seems telling because the prompt makes no mention of ethnicity or global location but although I didn't realize it when I came up with the prompt, "dustbowl" is a term apparently quite specific to 1930s America, as made familiar by movies and novels in general and Steinbeck in particular. I always imagined it to be a lot more generic than that.

That goes some way to explaining the clothing, too, which is vaguely appropriate to that setting with a lot of blue jeans, denim jackets, and long canvas dresses. Again, I only specified that it be "old" and "worn", something not all the models seemed to notice.

Neither did I say which way the figure should be facing but only nine feature a figure walking away from the viewer. All the rest are walking towards the camera except for one extreme outlier, apparently crossing the path from the left to the right. 

Juggernaut Flux Lightning

As for age, the various models took a fairly broad interpretation of "young", with the female figures
seeming to vary from mid-teens to mid-thirties. Two of the models ignored the instruction to make the figure "young" altogether and went for a white-haired, much older woman instead. 

All of the models, without exception, interpreted "corn field" to mean maize or sweet-corn., something I suspect shows a very strong North American bias in the data. When I wrote the prompt I wasn't imagining anything like that, as can be seen in the original short story from which the quote was taken. Where I come from, a "corn field" loosely means any arable crop. I was most likely thinking of wheat or barley. Certainly not maize. It also seems to clash somewhat with the aforementioned tight interpretation of "dustbowl".

Only a handful of models added anything significant to the background and when they did it was usually something that gave the image a somewhat post-apocalyptic or sci-fi feel. I'm not really sure where that comes from. Maybe it's just me, seeing things that aren't there.

Animagine XL v3

Another handful gave the figure something to carry, almost always luggage of some kind. There's a single image in which the woman appears to be holding some kind of gun. Most of the women are bare-headed but there's a smattering of hats. One very odd take puts the figure in what looks like a space-suit.

Given that I didn't give any suggestions at all on palette beyond the single word "color",  the collection is remarkably consistent, all shades of yellow and brown. Sepia is a particular favorite. Occasionally there's a pleasant blue sky. The very few images that use a lot of color really stand out. 

Every shot is taken in daylight, too, although a couple look like the sun is about to go down. Again, that was never specified or even mentioned so presumably "daytime" is some kind of default.

This degree of relative consistency is something I've also recently noticed as a feature of Suno, where I've had cause to reuse the exact same prompts multiple times, with just a single word changed, trying to fine-tune something. It's clear that whatever the mysterious black-box processes behind these images and sounds might be, they're far from random.

I'm very pleased with the portfolio I'm building up of these unnamed women, making their way across a somewhat forbidding landscape. I intend to carry on re-using the same prompt at least until I've run it through all the available free models, not so much to prove or test anything but just because I find it really entertaining to see what comes out each time I press the button.. 

When I'm finished, maybe I'll pick a dozen or so of the best ones and have them made into a poster. It could replace my Bojack Horseman by the Pool that faded so badly in the sun I had to take it down. Nightcafe does offer a print-and-frame service but I think I'll be doing this one myself.

 

Notes On AI Used In This Post:

Google Imagen 4.0

The prompt is in the post. All the models are given in the captions except for the four shots in the header image. The upper pair are both by Flux from before I started using a different model each time so it's no surprise they're so similar. The two beneath them are by two versions of the same model, HiDream I1, so again the similarity is explicable, although not so much the congruence of those two with the ones by Flux. The variant models for those two are HiDream I1 Dev on the left and HiDream I1 Full on the right. I notice the "full" model is a lot sharper and clearer.

My favorite, by some margin and not just of the selection you see here but of the entire run so far, is  the fourth from the top: the mid-teen girl in dungarees, carrying a heavy-looking sack and staring down at her feet, looking worried. That's very close to the image I had in my mind of the unnamed girl in the story and the very dusty, red-tinged field she's walking through is very like the setting. Perhaps surprisingly, that one's from a model one of whose whose biggest claims is that it "Excels in typography, producing text that closely resembles human-designed artwork."

I didn't use several of my other favorites because I was trying to give sense of the range and and to illustrate certain points I'd made. Before the event began, I was toying with the idea of posting one image a day throughout Blaugust and I might still do something like it, after it finishes. It just seems a shame not share the good ones.

Horse Latitudes

I had a great plan for today's post.... okay, a good plan... well, a plan, anyway. I was going to stump up my $25 (£20.99) for the weird horse-mystery MMORPG Equinox: Homecoming. It's going into Early Access on Steam today. Then I was going to play it for a couple of hours and write a First Impressions piece. Those are always fun and easy to do.

It seemed like a good idea to buy the thing anyway, not only because of the blogging opportunities it offers, always a major consideration these days, when I'm writing about games a lot more than I really play them, (And just how long can that go on, eh? Eh??) but because of that too-good-to-be true "Lifetime Subscription With Every Early Access Purchase" offer. 

As a blogger, even if the game tanks, $25 would be a fair price to pay, just to there for the drama. Lots to write about in a crash-and-burn. And if it turns into a success, $25 for permanent subscription-level perks is an insane bargain. Anything in-between would just be par for the course for an EA buy-in so it seemed like a no-lose scenario.

I was all set to Add To Cart when something caught my eye:

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS
MINIMUM:
Processor: i9-9900K 3.6 GHz 8 Core
Memory: 8 GB RAM
Graphics: GeForce RTX 2070
Network: Broadband Internet connection
Storage: 20 GB available space

Wait? What? i9?

This is going to sound very strange to a lot of people reading this, I know, but I can't recall ever even seeing a spec for a game I've been interested in that had an i9 requirement as a minimum. In fact, and you'll laugh when you hear this, I wasn't aware there was an i9.

I think the highest I've noticed before was i7. My PC runs on an i5. 

I have been looking at upgrades, although only because my desktop, which is nine (!) years old, isn't eligible for Windows 11 so I'm going to have to make some kind of decision about what that means in a few months, when Microsoft switch off support for Windows 10. All I need to do to make it acceptable, though, is to enable Secure Boot and TPM 2.0 in the BIOS, which I could do quite easily, and swap the CPU for one on MS's approved list.

The thing is, it's not the i-number that's the issue there. My laptop, which is already running W11, has an i5. In fact, Windows 11 runs on an i3. There are plenty of them on the Approved list. So, when I've been looking at possible processor upgrades, I haven't been thinking about how much more powerful they are, or how much newer; only how cheap. And there are plenty of relatively cheap CPUs that Windows 11 approves of.

Then there's the question of functionality, aka "if it ain't broke...". The reason my PC is nine years old, by far the longest I've ever gone without buying a new box, is that it runs everything I'm interested in without any noticeable problems. 

I have upgraded it a few times. Most recently, I doubled the Ram a  few years back. Still only 16GB, which I realize is nothing these days, but more than adequate for anything I'm asking it to do. 

I also bought a decent video card (GeForce RTX4070) in the summer of 2023, which made a big difference to my gaming then, although I'm so used to it now I don't think about it any more. I've been doing a lot of video editing recently and that's been painless and comfortable. I haven't run into any games I wanted to play but couldn't up to now. Other than the W11 issue, there hasn't seemed  to be any point thinking about further upgrades, let alone replacing the whole machine.

I'm still not sure there is but even if I did decide to swap out the CPU, I'd only be looking at going up to an i7 because my motherboard, a Gigabyte z170 Gaming K3, can't accept anything higher. The incentive to upgrade isn't really there, either. I've looked into it before and the difference between my i5, which has always bench-marked as faster than expected, and the i7s I've considered isn't all that great. If you can't see the difference, what's the point?

If I did decide to go further than that, it would mean changing the motherboard and while I'm okay with a certain amount of fiddling about inside the case that's where I draw the line, so it would mean a new PC. And I am not about to buy a new PC just so I can play an Early Access game where I ride around on horseback solving mysteries.

I could just buy the game and try it to see if it runs anyway. It might. I've played a few games before, where my PC didn't meet minimum spec and they've worked fine. I've never refunded a Steam game but I believe you get a couple of hours grace. Plenty of time to see if it would run acceptably. Or at all.

So, I suppose I might do that. At the moment, though, I'm kind of disposed not to bother. It'd be nice to be in at the beginning but I'll lay odds Equinox:Homecoming will be in Early Access for a year or two so there's no hurry. Also, give it a few months and we'll all have a better idea of whether it's going to be worth our time or not.

Right now, I'm thinking more along the lines of whether I might want to replace my PC later in the year after all. Maybe the i9 minimum for the horse game is a straw in the wind. After all, that processor generation, for all that I didn't even know it existed, is itself about five years old now. If I'm going to carry on playing new games into my retirement, I guess I'll have to get a new machine eventually. Maybe now's the time.

No rush. No need for snap decisions. I might start looking, though. See what's around. Given the volatile nature of both the global economy right now and of computer hardware in general, it's always hard to know when is or isn't a good time to buy. It's always fun window-shopping though.

Finally, dragging my thoughts away from the personal, what does this i9 minimum spec mean for the game itself? According to Games Radar, Colin Cragg, CEO of Blue Scarab, the developer behind Equinox:Homecoming, is aiming for an audience of "horse girls", described evocatively by Ashley Bardhan, who wrote the piece, as

 "Graceless, American; rough hands, and breath that smells of apple pie – the stereotypical female horse enthusiast, or horse girl".

Cragg used to be CEO of Star Stable, the well-established long-running horse-based MMO (What? You didn't know there were more?). It's a successful game: "$35 million of recurring revenue every year". 

Star Stable, though, has much lower minimum specs than Equinox: Homecoming. My nine-year old PC would have no problems running it. In fact, even my laptop meets the requirements, integrated graphics and all. 

The interview and especially Ashley's commentary is full of entirely appropriate and very welcome observations about the need to address the "52% of the world population" currently being ignored by conventional AAA game design, while at the same time making them feel like they're being "catered to" and not infantalized: 

"characters say "fuck" like the teenagers they're meant to be, rather than speak in My Little Pony talking points about friendship and magic"

I'm not entirely sure all these points connect, exactly. I'm not a major My Little Pony fan but I never really thought of it as an IP that appealed much to teenagers in the first place, sweary or otherwise. And I don't believe either friendship or magic come pre-gendered. 

More importantly, I wonder how many Star Stable players have hardware capable of running Equinox:Homecoming? I don't and my ageing set-up generally falls around average in those Steam surveys, which I'm guessing are already somewhat biased towards both males and hobbyists.

I wish I could run it, though. The more I hear about the game, the more interesting it sounds. I look forward to reading someone else's First Impressions. Sadly, my own will have to wait, for now.

"She's So Much More Than Perky Pat..."

Want to see something weird? Take a look at this. I do not know what to think of it.

I mean, it's creepy, right? Really creepy. PC Gamer pungently labelled it "an AI-powered digital purgatory that you can trap a small anime girl in, forever".

It's also like some warped window into the future. Is this what's coming? Not this, exactly, but something like this, only much, much more sophisticated, with far-reaching implications for how we live and what we think of as real.

Obviously, it reminds me of Philip K Dick because everything in the future does. Specifically it reminds me of Perky Pat and The Gameplayers of Titan but all his stuff is shot through with this sort of thing. 

When I saw it, though, the very first thing that came into my mind was that character in one of Peter F. Hamilton's series who keeps a bunch of tiny AI people in some kind of virtual ecology on his spaceship and ends up falling in love with one of them and, if I remember correctly, having some kind of ethical epiphany about the reality of what he's been doing that leads to a sort of personal enlightenment. 

Obviously I forget the details, especially the important ones like the name of the character or the books they were in and, if I'm honest, whether any of them were actually written by Peter F. Hamilton at all. I also remember thinking at the time that it seemed like an ending drenched in particularly Hamiltonian techno-optimism. I'm not at all sure the scenario would have played out the way he suggested. He does like a happy ending.

 But let's not worry about that. Those are just specifics. We all know this trope is all over Sci-Fi and has been since forever.

 

I ought to clarify my position a little here. This specific iteration makes me itchy but I am very much on record as saying I want a robot pet with full "AI" capabilities, so clearly I'm not opposed to the principle so much as the application. 

I'd also prefer actual AI to the fake sort we have now but since that doesn't exist yet I'd settle for an always-on wifi link to one of the LLMs that would allow my pet to talk to me in real time. That's surely doable now, isn't it? Why don't we have those yet?

I did also say once that I'd like a similar function in a collar that Beryl could wear, so that when I talk to her, which I do all the time, as does Mrs Bhagpuss, she'd answer back. I'd be willing to put in the time to build up a personality for her the way Jeromai's been doing with his fiction. We already know Beryl's personality, of course. It'd just be a case of training the AI to reproduce it reliably on demand. Ideally in a funny dog voice.

These are ideas that could make someone a billionaire and I'm just giving them away for free here. Based on the uptake for the product I linked at the top, I wouldn't even have to make the damn thing to bring in hundred of thousands of dollars overnight.

Since I backed Stars Reach I've been getting regular emails from Kickstarter, telling me about other projects I might like to back. I don't want to back any Kickstarters if I can avoid it so mostly I haven't even been opening them but for some reason I opened this one and now I wish I hadn't. 

Or perhaps I'm glad I did. Both of those, I guess. It's better to know than not know, isn't it? Or is ignorance bliss?  Funny how homilies tend to cancel each other out. 

Anyway, the thing to know in this case is that the goal of this Kickstarter was $5,000 and by the time I got the email, which was two weeks into the six-week campaign, they had over $700k. They raised $450k in the first twenty-four hours. At time of writing the campaign is closing in on a million dollars and the Kicktraq estimate for the final total is over $2m.

Leaving aside the actual product and all its multifarious implications, there's something here I don't quite get. Why did the people behind the project ask for just five thousand dollars in the first place? Clearly that number bears absolutely no relation to the costs involved.

Even odder are the delivery dates: August 2025 for all pledges (Although the rotating base doesn't get to you until October.) This suggests the Kickstarter is a less a fund-raiser than some kind of pre-order system for a product already close to being commercially available. Is that what people use the platform for now?

Well, apparently, yes they do because in the same email I was directed towards this. It's a lot less interesting conceptually and certainly not controversial in any way. It's just yet another hand-held device you can play games on. But the Kickstarter goal for this one is even lower - less than £1,000 and the estimated delivery time is even shorter - June 2025.

The project's not doing quite as well, either. it's only managed to raise £167k so far. Still, Kicktraq reckons they'll pull in over £400k by the close, so not too shabby on a £1k ask.

I guess the big questions here are:

• If these are real products, almost ready to go into production and be shipped out in a matter of months, what do they need a Kickstarter for?
• If they do need raise funds through pledges, why are the targets so laughably low?
• Is Kickstarter now just a shop-window, providing relatively cheap advertising for commercial products about to hit market?

There could be other questions, I guess. I can think of a couple...

I won't ask them, though. I'm pretty sure we'll have the answers soon enough.

Now, will someone just get on with making my AI robot dog already?

 

Notes on AI used in this post

Lol! Where would I even start?

Okay, sticking to the AI used by me, there's only the header image. That's by FluxSchnell at NightCafe using default settings except runtime (Medium). The prompt was the PC Gamer quote "an AI-powered digital purgatory that you can trap a small anime girl in, forever".

She looks sad, doesn't she?  As well she should.

I wanted to use a picture of Perky Pat but NightCafe blocked it. Not sure why.  I assume it was because I gave it PKD's name and the full title of the short story and there might be copyright issues. If I hadn't, though, I can't imagine it would have known who or what Perky Pat was. So, Catch 22. 

Which, presumably, would also be blocked.

Is This thing On?

This is going to be a fairly short post, in part because it's kind of a proof of concept. I'm writing it on my new laptop, instead of my desktop, to see how comfortable it feels. 

So far? It feels pretty good.

When I say "new laptop" I mean, of course, new to me. Have you seen the price if new laptops these days? I have and I was shocked. Shocked, I tell you! 

Refurbished ones, on the other hand... They're really cheap. I paid a little under £200 for this one to get a much higher spec than anything brand-new in a similar price range. To get a similar spec on a new machine would have cost around three times as much. Maybe more.

And this machine is probably about as low-spec as I wanted to go. I don't need a laptop that can run new, AAA games but I would at least like one that play some of the older games in my Steam library. The model I bought is meant mainly for business users, I think. It only has integrated graphics but it should be able to run quite a few of the games I want to play. It's going to be interesting, finding out which ones are playable and which aren't.

Oh, I suppose I ought to say what it is. It's a refurbished Lenovo Thinkpad T480. The model came out in 2018 and was discontinued in 2021 so it's three-to-six years old, I guess. Somewhere in there. That might not sound great but it's replacing my Dell XPS PP28l, which I bought pretty much when it first came out - in 2008.

And it still works, kinda. Dells do go on and on. I had to replace the Hard Drive a few years back and for about a year now the B,N and Space keys haven't worked, which makes typing fun, but it's fine for web-browsing and watching YouTube and Netflix, which is what I've been using it for. 

Beyond that though, it's so old and feeble it can't even reliably operate as a remote terminal for my desktop. I used to use Splashtop to play games on it but now it just cries if I try. The new one can, though. Perfectly. All part of my cunning plan. 

Because our house is old, the upstairs front room, where I have my P.C., is too cold in the winter while my other hideout, downstairs and also at the front, gets too hot in the summer. Consequently, I've been in the habit of moving up and down with the seasons. 

This year it hasn't really gotten cold enough to force me to shift my PC and associated clutter downstairs but January is predicted to be bitter so I either have to deal with higher heating bills to keep myself warm upstairs or make the effort and move down, even though by now it will only be for about three months. I really don't want the hassle, which is why I've been putting it off.

I was thinking about replacing the ancient Dell anyway, for obvious reasons, and it occurred to me that if I had a laptop that was good enough to write blog posts on and also play some less-taxing games, I ought to be able to "work" and play in any room of the house, all year round.  I could even sit out in the garden in the summer, now I also bought a more powerful router last year. 

If I felt like it I could probably play newer titles, like Wuthering Waves or Once Human, on the laptop using Splashtop, like I used to before the Dell rolled over and begged for mercy. GeForce Now and Luna are possibilities, too.

I spent a good while pondering on which laptop to get. I didn't have a specific budget but I didn't want to spend more than I needed. In the end it was more a matter of deciding what I didn't want than the other way round. 

I didn't want any kind of Chromebook for a start. I didn't want anything running on a processor too weedy to do much more than my Dell, either. I did a lot of research on that and it's amazing how feeble some of the CPUs in brand-new laptops. I guess if you just watch stuff, look stuff up and do your admin, you wouldn't really notice. Some people seem to prefer it that way. If you read the reviews on Amazon, you'll see people almost boasting about how the new machine they just bought can't play any games at all as if somehow that makes them better people.

I also quite liked the idea of being able to open the thing up and swap some components if I wanted, or needed to, later on. Even repair it, within my limited capacity. Not that there's much I can do but I can at least change a battery or swap out a disk drive. Not an option with most of the machines I looked at.

Finally, given the imminent demise of Windows 10, I wanted something Microsoft wouldn't be able to wash their hands of in a few months. Neither my desktop nor Mrs Bhagpuss's meet the criteria for Win11 upgrades (Although they would if I put better CPUs in them, which I might when the time comes.) so in that sense, if in no other, the new laptop would actually be the most up-to-date computer in the house. Always excluding Mrs Bhagpuss's new iPhone 15, I guess...

The T480 I chose came with Windows 11 Pro installed. It has 16GB Ram and an i5 CPU. 8th Gen, whatever that's worth. It also has what's reckoned to be a very good keyboard and after writing this I can confirm it's well above what I'm used to on a laptop, although it's still going to take some getting used to after my mechanical one. Definitely good enough to blog with, anyway, which is the important thing.

Apart from the lack of a dedicated graphics chip, pretty much unavoidable unless I wanted to pay a fortune, the only real thing I don't like is the size of the SSD, which is only 256GB. That seems to be standard for laptops in this price range and some way  above, though. Easy enough to upgrade if I feel it's necessary.

In fact, I've already ordered a 1TB SSD as an add-on but I'm in two minds whether to use it to replace the current one or to put it in an enclosure and use it as an external drive instead. I actually think that might be better for my purposes, given my seeming inability to resist downloading every damn game I see. It'd be nice to keep the drive with the operating system on nice and clean for once.

So much for hardware. Software is another issue altogether. One thing I never remember is just how long it takes to get a new PC set up in the particular way I like it. The Lenovo worked perfectly straight out of the box or at least it did once I'd jumped through Microsoft's hoops, but then came the hours of installing all my favorite apps and changing  endless Windows defaults to eliminate as much of Microsoft's malign influence as possible.

To be fair to MS, it's not so much that there's anything wrong with Edge or Media Player and the rest per se. It's just that other options are so much better. I guess one day I'll have to give up using Firefox, since already there are well-known websites that refuse to recognize it, but until that dark day comes I will keep the faith.

That said, it's ironic that the single biggest problem I've had so far, getting Splashtop running on the laptop, turned out to be precisely because I was using Firefox. Or, more specifically, because the first add-on I always install is No Script. It's an essential protection in my estimation but you do have to remember to whitelist stuff sometimes, or at least toggle it off when you need to. That's how I came to waste those two hours this morning - I forgot I had it installed.

Splashtop is working now and I've tested it with Wuthering Waves and Cloudpunk. Both run perfectly through the remote connection to my PC upstairs with no lag or delay that I can tell. 

Unfortunately, while Wuthering Waves is perfectly playable when my character is stationary or I move her using the keyboard, something is making the point of view spin wildly whenever I use mouselook, which is unfortunate because that's how I move all the time. I'm looking into that but I won't be exploring the new continent on the laptop until I figure out a fix.

Cloudpunk has no such problems. In fact, if anything, I find driving the HOVA a little easier on the laptop, for some reason. Maybe it's the smaller screen or because I have it closer to me. Or maybe I'm just getting the feel of it. 

I played for over an hour this afternoon and had an excellent time. It's a very good game and my suspicions of a deeper, darker narrative beneath the surface are already proving to be well-founded. More on that another day, I'm sure.

Quite possibly more on the new laptop, too. It's going to be a while before I get to grips with all its idiosyncrasies. For example, I couldn't figure out how to take screenshots in Cloudpunk because the default Steam screenshot key, F12, didn't seem to be doing anything. Turns out Lenovo assigns specific functions to the F keys and you have to turn the feature off if you want to use them as God intended. 

All things considered, though, I'm very happy with my new toy. Fingers crossed it carries on behaving itself. It has a year's warranty but I could still do without any problems cropping up that need more of a fix than looking something upon Google or watching a YouTube video.

Taking The Temperature Of The Room...

Let me begin by thanking Redbeard and and Nimgimli for their kind comments on yesterday's post and by re-assuring them and anyone else who may have thought I was under the weather - in a figurative rather than a literal sense - that I'm perfectly fine! This is what you get for trying to come over all mysterious and enigmatic. It just confuses people and gives them the wrong idea, as I'm sure any goth will tell you.

Let's begin at the beginning of what I'm afraid is going to be a very dull and disappointing story. That's kind of why I dressed it up as a mystery in the first place.

Back in December, a close friend of ours departed on a six-week trip to India, leaving behind her hamster, Captain Flapjack. She's the person who looks after Beryl twice a month, on the Saturdays when Mrs Bhagpuss and I are both out at work, so of course we were more than happy to return the favor and look after the Captain while she was away.

I had a few hamsters as a child and we had a couple here when the children were... well, when they were children... and I don't recall taking any special care or precautions with them, other than trying to make sure they didn't get out of their cages and try to set up home under the floorboards. They always seemed like fairly straightforward, low-maintenance pets. Then again, now I come to think of it, none of those hamsters lived all that long...

I also have no idea now what sub-species of hamster they would have been but I suspect it might have been the Siberian variety because we certainly never made any special arrangements concerning the temperature of their living accomodation. Jack, on the other hand, is a Syrian hamster and they really don't like the cold. (Actually, I just checked and both kinds of hamster have the same temperature requirements so I imagine that explains why the ones I had as a kid never made it through a whole year...)

According to most sources, the approximate comfortable temperature range for a hamster is between 18c-22c. The parameters vary a bit but anything below 15c is likely to trigger a hibernation response, which can be the last you see of them. 

This did seem like a potential problem, given that there's no room in our house that keeps a constant temperature, day and night. We tend to just put the heating on in the rooms we use, when we're in them and my idea of a pleasant, indoor temperature in the winter is anything in double figures. I just put on more clothes if I start to feel chilly.

The only room in our extremely poorly insulated, very drafty house that maintains anything close to a stable temperature is the back bedroom that has the airing cupboard with the hot water tank in it. It's always the room with the highest ambient temperature in the winter, although that generally means more like 10c than 20c. 

Still, it seemed like the best option, not least because it also has a four-foot long, wooden blanket chest, made, so legend goes, by my great-grandfather. It's big enough that I used to hide inside it as a child. 

That would make an excellent base for the large cage the Captain was going to live in, a brand new one with escape-proof all-glass walls because if he ever got loose in our house he would certainly never be seen again.

In mid-December the cage was constructed, the hamster was collected and transferred to his holiday home, and a thermostatically-controlled heater was installed to ensure a constant temperature suitable for his needs. Our friend departed for India and we were left to look after the Captain.

All of this, by chance, co-incided with one of the warmest spells of winter weather for more than twenty years. Where we live it felt more like April than December. We had the heating off most of the time and we were even able to leave the back door open so Beryl could go into the garden when she felt like it. 

I had already moved my own operations from the upstairs room I use in the Spring and Summer to the downstairs room I use when the weather gets cold. The upstairs room is much nicer in warm weather but the downstairs room has a gas fire and gets the winter sun through the big windows. It was so warm though, relatively speaking, that I hadn't even needed to put the gas fire on, most days.

That was the status quo all through Christmas and the New Year until, a few days ago, the jet stream shifted and, after dumping what felt like a month's worth of rain on us in a couple of days, the temperature dropped to just above zero as high pressure established itself over the country, meaning it was going to stay cold for a good while.

This was when I had the bright idea of saving some money by sharing my accommodation with the Captain. Since his room had to be heated anyway, why waste money heating another room downstairs, just so I could sit at the computer screen without getting hypothermia?

I'd already been experimenting with using the laptop as a remote terminal, slaved to my hugely more powerful PC via Splashtop. In the summer, Beryl doesn't like to go to bed too early so I'd been using the set-up to sit in the back garden after the sun went down, doing this and that on the laptop while she enjoyed the cool of the evening. It seemed like a good idea to reverse that for my own benefit , sitting upstairs in the warm with the laptop, while my PC did the heavy lifting downstairs in the cold - which of course is the kind of temperature PCs prefer anyway.

And it would have worked too if it hadn't been for those pesky kids a few unexpected technical difficulties. I'd completely forgotten the space bar and some of the letters on the last row of the laptop's built-in keyboard weren't working any more. I mean, the thing is old enough to be in a museum so it's not surprising but it had still slipped my mind.

Worse, I'd also forgotten the only spare, "working" keyboard I had lying around also has a dodgy space bar. It works but only when it wants to. I spent almost as long going through yesterday's post, adding spaces between words where they were missing, as I did writing it. 

Finally, to cap it all, it wasn't until I was playing The Dungeon of Nahelbeuk on the laptop yesterday that I realised the wifi mouse was faulty too! I swear the right button worked last time I used it but it's completely non-functional now.

All of that would probably have been enough to make the prospect of writing a long post like this extremely unappealing but you can add physical discomfort to the list. The room the Captain is in has a double bed in it and along with that massive blanket chest the furniture takes up about 85% of the floor space. 

There's no feasible place to put a desk or a table, even assuming I had one to spare, so about the only option is to sit on the bed with the laptop on one of those bed-tables with the folding legs. Mrs. Bhagpuss bought one a while ago to craft on but never used it because it was too awkward. I can see her point, now.

And that's about where we came in yesterday, when I'd been putting off writing a post all day because of the sheer inconvenience, awkwardness and annoyance of the whole thing. As I explained, I didn't want to skip a day, so I thought I'd bang out a very quick apology, stuff in a couple of pictures and an annoying song and hope to think of a better solution tomorrow.

Even I could see that would make for a pretty thin post, so I added a little mystery at the start and left the details vague so as to make it sound more interesting. I can see, reading it back, that it does sound a bit like I'm not feeling up to posting much due to some kind of health issue (Mention of being in bed, lack of energy...) but in fact it was merely a combination of parsimony and laziness.

As you may have guessed from the length of this post, I am now seated in my usual spot downstairs. I went so far as to put the fire on for a while to warm the room up so I could get this done. Captain Flapjack will be going back to his own home in not much more than a couple of weeks so my new plan, at least for as long as the cold weather lasts, is to use the PC downstairs when I'm posting, then return to the warmth of the upper hamster-room to play games, web-browse, watch Netflix and do all the other things that feel quite comfortable on the laptop.

The whole episode has made it quite clear to me, however, that I really ought to get a new laptop. And a new WiFi mouse. And a new spare keyboard. And a few other things. Saving money by never replacing anything only takes you so far...

Also, that blanket chest could probably be put to better use than storing a bunch of old jumpers no-one's ever going to wear again...

Technical Difficulties

For reasons too unhinged to explain (Involving a hamster, a six week trip to India and a sudden change in the weather, all of which makes the whole thing sound a whole lot more intriguing than it really is.) I find myself sitting cross-legged on my bed, typing this on an old Dell keyboard with a wonky space bar. 

The keyboard is attached to my ancient Dell XPS laptop, whose own keyboard no longer has a functioning space bar at all. Nor the letters "B" or "N", for that matter.  I'm also using a wireless mouse on which the RMB doesn't work. Entropy is real.

The laptop is slaved to my usual PC downstairs by way of Splashtop, an arrangement that works surprisingly well, at least now I've changed the screen resolution so I can make out what I've written from more than a few inches away. 

The upshot of all of this is that writing a proper post would take more effort, concentration and energy than I'm willing to put in right now. Also that I need to get a new laptop. 

Despite everything, I didn't want to go two days without posting anything so here we are.

I'm just going to drop in a screenshot or two and maybe a video and we'll call it even. How about one made entirely by humans that's going to make you long for the day the AIs take over? Well, tough. That's what we're having.

 Soul Hole - @

With luck, I'll have sorted myself out by this time tomorrow and there'll be a proper post. Then again, I told myself yesterday I'd have all those problems sorted today and look what happened, so I wouldn't count on it.

Still beats posting on my Kindle Fire!

You Had One Job...

As I said yesterday, my daily routine these days concludes with a couple of hours of viewing time, all of which happens in bed, on my five year-old, 8" Kindle Fire. Having used the device for half a decade, I'm still in two minds over whether or not I'd recommend it. It very much depends on what you'd want to use it for, which I suppose applies to most things, but seems particularly foregrounded here.

The negatives became apparent fairly early on and have only gotten worse. You're at least theoretically locked into Amazon's ecosystem although one of the first things I did after I set the tablet up was to go online and research how to sideload Google Play. That gets you access to the whole of the wider Android marketplace but it doesn't do you a lot of good when most of the stuff you're interested in comes up as "Not available for your device".

The Kindle Fire is definitely not designed for playing games. It wasn't great at it when I bought it and half a decade later it won't run anything new that I want to try. That's how I ended up installing Bluestacks and re-installing Nox the other day, although as I said at the time, neither of those will run the one game I wanted to play, either. 

They will run pretty much everything else the Kindle Fire won't, though, and there's a third option I meant to mention but forgot, that being Google's own proto-PC-platform, Google Play Games. As the official description puts it 

"Google Play Games on PC brings the best of Google Play by enabling players to experience an immersive and seamless cross-platform gameplay."

The service is still in beta but a couple of weeks back Google rolled it out to 120 countries so it's pretty widely available. At some point I'll probably give it a fair run and post about how I find it but my initial impression is that it's slick and professional as you'd expect but with a limited choice of games as yet. 

It looks as though Google are trying to ensure the games on the service are playable natively using PC controls. There's some of this built into the service itself with key-mapping and games are categorised as either "compatible" or "optimized", depending on how much work the developer has done to port their titles across to PC. 

A quick check of what's available right now yields somewhat disappointing results. Genshin Impact is there, although why you'd need to use the mobile version on PC when there's an actual PC edition is hard to imagine. On the other hand, Honkai Star Rail, is not, so maybe the reverse logic also applies, an argument made neither more nor less convincing by the presence on Google Play Games of HSR's sister title, the oddly-named Honkai Impact 3rd which, although I'd never heard of it until now, is apparently also available on Steam.

Neither Black Desert Mobile nor Dragon Nest (Any version.) are included, unfortunately, and neither is Sky: Children of Light, the game I installed the service hoping to be able to play. For now, there seems to be no real reason to prefer Google Play Games over the established independent alternatives but I have no doubt that will soon change, provided whoever's sponsoring this one at Google doesn't lose interest and wander off.

Returning to the supposed topic, my Kindle Fire, I would also be hesitant to say anything very good about its Amazonian operating system. Derived from Android but heavily modified, FireOS is functional but limited. It chugs along, occasionally halting and requiring a reboot to get it going again. I'd blame that on the age of my Fire but that wouldn't be a convincing excuse; it's always done it.

As for web-browsing, I wouldn't say "forget it" but I would say "bring a book". I tend to use my Kindle within a few feet of the router with a five-bar signal strength rated "Excellent" by the Fire itself and yet it takes what seems like forever to load a new web page. Actually it's seconds but a second is forever in computer time.

Not a real Mondrian.

Worse, the Fire's ability to stream from a website seems inordinately inferior to the speed it can shunt information from one of its own authorised apps like Prime or Netflix. The YouTube app, which I really don't like, works much better than watching the same YouTube videos on Firefox or Chrome, where they sometimes display only as faux-Mondrian blocks of colored squares.

A minor but exceptionally irritating aspect of FireOs is its bull-headed refusal even to consider delivering notifications. As far as I can tell after extensive research it's literally impossible to get a Kindle Fire to cough up the code from a Google Notification, making certain apps entirely inaccessible to me if I'm foolish enough to try and use a Google account to log in. I don't actually approve of the Notification process to begin with but as with many things in life, you'd rather be able to have it and not use it than be denied entirely.

So much for the things the Kindle Fire does badly or not at all. Obviously it would have gone to the back of the cupboard under the stairs long ago if it didn't also have some powerful positives. Really, one positive: the display.

The Fire is designed as a media device by which Amazon really mean a screen on which to watch things you've bought from Amazon. As the name implies, it can act as a Kindle for reading text, a job it performs very well, if not quite as well as an old school Kindle with one of those screens that apes paper. Or so I assume. I've never used one.

Where the Kindle Fire really shines, though, is in video. The display is significantly better than my monitor and far better than my (Admittedly crappy.) television. Even though mine is a five year-old, basic model, the image is intensely crisp and sharp. I'm not sure my eyes are capable of interpreting better.

I didn't ask for a fox.

The thing I found most interesting about watching moving images on a handheld-screen when I first
started was how immersive it could be, even when the image was much smaller than those I was used to. The such first device I ever used was an MP4 player, the make and model of which I can no longer remember. It had a screen about two inches square, so small you'd have imagined it would be all but useless for anything more than reading the liner notes on an album, yet I was able to download TV shows and watch them at work in my lunch break with as much enjoyment as if I was sitting in front of my TV screen at home.

Later, I watched some of the same shows again on a much larger screen and was fascinated by the detail I'd missed but the more surprising discovery was that the lack of that extra visual information didn't seem to have reduced my pleasure or understanding to any meaningful degree. I'm of the opinion the imagination readily fills in the absent detail without the viewer even realising there's anything missing.

Fascinating as that process may be, it's irrelevant to the Kindle Fire. In fact, my experience suggests its rather the reverse. When I move between watching the same shows on my PC monitor and the Kindle Fire, it's the image on the smaller screen that feels more distinct. I prefer it and not just because when I'm watching the Fire I'm usually lying down - although that certainly doesn't hurt.

There's a lot of information available online about the optimal screen size to viewing distance ratio. The Fire display has clearly been optimized for viewing at a comfortable arm's length. If you have average-length arms, I guess. It feels natural, comfortable and immersive. I find it easier to get lost in the image with the Kindle Fire than with just about any other screen I've watched, large or small.

Now I did.

Finally but not at all unimportantly, the sound on the Kindle is really good. I'd prefer it if the speakers faced forward rather than straight up into the ceiling, but they still deliver gratifyingly clear audio at a consistent volume that doesn't vary between applications the way it does on my PC.

The two final positives I have to share about the Kindle Fire are also the two main reasons I bought it in the first place. Kindles are very cheap and very reliable. 

Prior to buying mine, I'd been through something like seven or eight tablets in four or five years. Either I broke them or they broke themselves. Some of them were objectively superior in some respects to the Kindle and most I'd been quite happy with while they lasted but I was fed up of paying good money for devices that barely limped past the manufacturer's minimum guarantee before falling over.

That my Fire, which cost me less than half the price of most of my previous tablets, is still working as well after five years as it did five minutes out of the box is enough to make me feel charitable towards its many flaws. That and the fact it does the one thing I really want it to do pretty much perfectly means there's every chance that, when it finally does expire I'll most likely buy another.

As I implied at the beginning, I wouldn't exactly recommend the thing but then I wouldn't try to dissuade anyone from buying one, either. For me, it has one job to do and it does it well, so I guess it gets a passing grade.