Never Mind The Music, Just Look At The Pictures

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That is something AI is good at, after all.

Strolling Through The Void - Rage of Cthurath On EZ-Mode

I haven't exactly finished the latest EverQuest II expansion, Rage of Cthurath. In many ways I've barely started. But I have finished the two Signature Questlines for both Crafters and Adventurers. It's enough, I think, for me to give some kind of appraisal, even if it's not enough for a full review.

The first thing I'd say is that I like this expansion a lot. It's been fun. I'll get to why that is in a bit but I'll say up front that I'm speaking very specifically from the perspective of a fairly casual solo player. What it's been like for group-oriented players or raiders I have no idea.

It's also been pretty good value, I'd say, although it's incredibly hard to judge whether any expansion for any MMORPG offers a good return on however much you paid for it. With single-player games you can get to the end and do that "hours-per-dollar" calculation. On top of that, especially if it's one of those multiple ending deals, you might make some allowances for replayability.

With an MMORPG, the expansion provides a springboard for other content as much as it represents anything complete in itself. And then there's the question of alts. If you play a number of characters, as many people do, it's likely you'll take more than one of them through the expansion and also that other characters on your account will benefit from hand-me-downs and account-level flags and unlocks.

In my case, I've started three characters on the two Signatures already. Eventually I'll probably take as many as half a dozen through both. Does that mean I should multiply the value by the number of characters who complete one or the other or both?

Probably not but it does suggest any hours-per-dollar calculation shouldn't just work off a single run. And even if it did, I'm most likely already getting close to the traditional dollar-an-hour break-even.

So, I'm very happy with the quality and the quantity, then, am I? It certainly sounds like it, the way I'm talking. 

Yeah, no, maybe not really... I'm not sure...

The Signature quests are definitely getting shorter. I don't think there can be any doubt about that. There was a time when it took me longer to to finish one instance than it takes me now to do the entire thing. Or it felt like it, anyway. And there were those couple of expansions where absolutely everything seemed to revolve around raising multiple factions before you could even get anyone to give you the damn quests.

Is that what I want? No, it's not. What that did was put me right off the idea of taking multiple characters through the storyline. It took ages, it felt like a grind, it didn't seem to get any faster with experience and it wasn't anything I'd want to repeat. I was mostly just glad to have gotten it done at all..

That's not the case here. It's fast and entertaining, even though the storyline in Rage of Cthurath is thin, there's no denying it. And obviously, it makes no sense. That's a given. No EQII expansion's storyline has made sense for years. It's fine. It's expected. This tale, though, seems perfunctory even by recent standards. 

Here's my best attempt at a spoiler, based on what I can remember, without looking anything up. 

Lord Lucan, in his never-ending search for a means of world-domination, has gotten his hands on a McGuffin that's turned out to be more than he bargained for. Somehow, it attracted the attention of a Lovecraftian Elder God and now he's a puppet.

Meanwhile Lady Najena, who used to be a villain, has somehow gotten involved, only this time she's on our side. A whole load of spooky portals have popped up all around Norrath, spewing out Void entities we're all familiar with from previous invasions. She's trying to put a stop to it because I have no idea why. I guess she's just annoyed it's not her that's doing it.

She recruits the Player Character because of course she does or there wouldn't be much of a story, would there? She sends the PC on a mission through a portal of her own and some space-goats hijack it and divert the PC into the Void so they can get some help to escape.

This inevitably leads to a big, exciting adventure... Hahaha! I'm kidding! No, it doesn't! It leads to a bunch of trivial errands, things like pulling up weeds and making dinner for a dog (Alright, a wolf. Does that make it any better?) before Najena herself arrives in The Void and gets things back on track.

From then on it's mostly a series of dungeons instances in which the PC has to plant a whole load of runes so as to... erm... I don't know. Protect something? I think I drifted off when Najena was explaining that part.

Anyway, it's all very important (And repetitive.) and means you have to kill a lot of named mobs, all of whom drop gear better than what you got out of the Tishan's Box at the start, so there's plenty in it for you even if you're not entirely clear on why you're doing it.

Eventually you stick the final rune where it's supposed to go and that severs the connection between Lucan and the Consumer, which is the really rather ill-considered name someone chose to give the Big Bad. There's one final confrontation in which the PC gets to fight The Consumer and Najena gets to summon some big rocks for the PC to hide behind when it all gets a bit much.

The Consumer disappears back to whatever nether-hell he came from, issuing dire threats of retribution, and Lucan is a free sociopath again. Except apparently he's had some kind of existential experience while under the influence because instead of getting straight back to the world domination, he announces he can't go back in case The Consumer has another go at him, mentally weakened as he is. Like he ever cared about Norrath before. other than to be in charge of it all.

The PC wonders, not unreasonably, what that means for Freeport, which Lucan has ruled with an iron fist inside an iron glove since at least 2004, Earth time. Najena tells them not to worry their pretty little head about it because she'll sort it all out and it'll all be fine, which isn't anything like as reassuring to hear as she thinks it is.

Credits roll. End of Episode One. To be continued in next expansion, probably. Oh, except do just pop off to the Unknown and see if you can find this other McGuffin, would you? You weren't doing anything important, right now, were you?

It was just as well there was a post-credit sequence because the main questline only took Mordita to level 133. There are two more levels to go so any quests are welcome, however trivial. No other way to get the xp, these days.

The Tradeskill Signature line is basically the same only without nearly everything I just said. If the Adventure Sig is thin, the Crafting one is positively skeletal. Mostly it's gathering mats, making stuff out of them and waiting several hours until you can do it again. 

What do you want from a crafting questline, though? Narrative? I just want the recipes for the five new levels, mostly. And I have them now, so I'm happy.

And I'm happy about the Adventure timeline, too, because the fighting was actually fun for once! How many expansions are there where I would have been able to say that with a straight face? Not very many.

Why was it fun? Because it was very, very easy, that's why. And I like easy. If you like challenge, you are not going to be anything like as happy as I was. There isn't any.

Okay, a slight caveat. I have never taken a Necromancer through the Sig Line of an expansion before. Not first up, anyway. I don't have a benchmark for how easy that would usually be.

And it's true that the main reason I wanted to swap from my Berserker was to make things easier for myself. I totally did not expect it to be this much easier, though, and I can't help but think there's more going on than better DPS.

Midnight : tiny but mighty.

There's one thing I noticed that I find very hard to explain: Mordita's combat pet never seemed to take any damage. None at all. Ever. 

A Necro has excellent healing options. I also had a healer mercenary ready to heal both Mordita and her pet. Neither I nor the NPC needed to heal the pet at all.

After a while I started to wonder what was going on so I began paying close attention to the pet's health bar. It didn't move. Not a pixel. 

It was 100% all the time. I never saw it drop even one per cent. I moused over it to see the numbers. I never saw them change. Not on huge overpulls. Not on bosses. Not if I just stood back and watched to see what would happen. The pet seemed to be effectively invulnerable throughout the entire Signature line. It was also extremely good at getting and holding aggro, allowing Mordita to chain-cast every damage spell in her artillery without a pause.

It's not like the mobs weren't putting out the damage, either. Mordita needed plenty of healing when adds got onto her before the pet grabbed them. The Mercenary even managed to get himself killed a couple of times. The pet, though? Didn't take the tiniest scratch that I ever saw.

So that can't be working as intended, surely. Maybe it's one of those good bugs. I've had invulnerable pets before. Just for a session, though, not for weeks on end. 

Even without the invulnerable pet, though, the whole thing seemed much easier than usual. For one thing, none of the bosses had any really irritating tricks. No mana drain, either, which is a huge improvement, although it's been a few expansions since that was in fashion.

Even the tricks they did have mostly involved running about, standing in certain spots or clicking on things. Nothing that wasn't immediately easy to understand and simple to do. 

Who are you and what have you done
with the real Lucan?

Bosses didn't have ludicrous health pools, either. They took damage at a very satisfying rate. I don't think any boss fight took more than a couple of minutes. I remember expansions where the trash took longer than that and the bosses took more like a quarter of an hour. As for the regular mobs, TTK was two or three seconds for most of them. 

All of that made me actively look forward to every instance, something I very rarely do. When I messed
something up in one of them (Only for a side-quest.) the thought of having to do the whole instance again didn't make me want to give up and play something else instead - it made feel like that might be fun.

All the instances are also quite compact and easy to navigate. There are lots of teleports and portals so you don't need to slog through miles of empty corridors to get anywhere. And visually the whole thing is spectacular. It doesn't come over in screenshots but in game there's a huge amount of three-dimensionality, lots of particle effects and movement. It's a pleasure to spend time there. 

There have been complaints about the pacing, particularly the way players have been left to cobble together a path to the cap involving side quests and repeatables but I'm quite happy to meander through those final two levels. It'll give me a chance to gather enough rares to upgrade Mordita's spells. 

Not that there's much sign of her needing the extra power. She went into the expansion with almost every spell at Expert level from the tier below and it seemed to give her more than enough firepower, not just to get the job done but to get it done quickly and easily. 

Rather than try to race through the last two levels with her, I think I might take a couple more characters through both the Adventure and Tradeskill Signatures first. The crafters should have a very easy time of it, what with every capped character giving a 20% xp bonus to those coming after and those also getting a reduction in waiting-time on the gatekeeping quests.

All in all, I'm very satisfied with Rage of Cthurath so far. I think it might be my favorite expansion for quite a while. But then I always say that, don't I? I'm a cheap date when it comes to expansions.

Cultured, Creative, Tech-Savvy, That's me! - YouTube Recaps My Year

In case you didn't know, YouTube just jumped on the Annual Review bandwagon with something called Recap. And you might not know, at that, because for some reason they chose to launch it in America and then roll it out across the rest of the world over a couple of weeks. I think everyone is supposed to have had theirs by now but there may still be a few Recap-deprived pockets here and there.

Or perhaps yours just isn't showing up for... reasons. I'm not one hundred per cent sure how it's supposed to work, even though I've had a look at the official YouTube blog about it and watched a couple of "How It Works" videos (On YouTube, of course.)

They aren't exactly going out of their way to publicize it. In theory you're supposed to get a banner across the top of your YouTube Home Page to tell you your personal Recap is available but I have two YouTube channels under the same account and it's only showing up on one of them. And it's not the main one, either.

If yours isn't showing and you'd like to see it, you can go to www.youtube.com/recap and providing you're also logged in to YouTube at the time, the very act of visiting the web page should force your shy Recap to reveal itself on your YT home page. I've tried it and it works. Well, it works for one of my channels...

Until this year, I only had the one YouTube channel, under the name Bhagpuss, which is what my original Google account was registered as a couple of decades ago. When I started making AI versions of my songs back in the Spring, I decided I needed to keep them separate, so I made a new channel under the same account. (Until then, I didn't even know that was a thing you could do.) 

The second channel's called That Darn Cat, which is also what I go by on Suno and, for that matter, a few other places. And since I do most of the music-making on my laptop in bed, TDC has turned into my de facto laptop identity. 

I don't usually bother swapping to the Bhagpuss channel to do other things on the laptop, either on YouTube or anywhere else, unless I absolutely have to, which probably explains some of the weirdnesses that occasionally crop up when I comment on other people's blogs, late at night. (And also when I reply to comments here occasionally, although I can edit those so you'd probably never notice...)

Of course, all I really do on the laptop, other than the music, is surf the web, watch streaming video on Prime and Netflix and BBC iPlayer and search for new music on YouTube. If I'm going to do anything more complicated, I'm probably going to wait until I'm back at my desk.

Anyway, I opened YouTube last night and there was this Recap banner at the top. Obviously, I clicked on it to see what it was. I mean, I could guess but I wanted to see for myself...

So I watched it. Didn't take long. And I'll be honest. It wasn't very good. 

If you're used to the level of detail and professionalism in Steam's Replay, for example, you are not going to be impressed by this. Perfunctory would be one word for it. Half-assed would be another.

Trying to be generous, I'll give them a pass because it is the first year YouTube has done one of these. Maybe they're learning on the job. Then again, YouTube has been around for nearly two decades now. Why is this the first year they've thought to give users a summary of their activity? I'll have that pass back, please.

That was my first reaction. My second was "Hey, hang on a  minute! Where are they even getting all this stuff from? I thought I had my YouTube History switched off!" 

Yes. Well. I did. I turned it off years ago. I never look at it and it heavily affects what suggestions and recommendations you get, which is the opposite of what I want. I want to see new things that aren't like the things I've already seen, or I do when I'm searching for new music. Having my own prior search history influence the algorithm is counter-productive.

That ought, presumably, to mean YouTube doesn't have the information stored to compile a statistical analysis and pick out the trends and highlights. At least, you'd hope so or what's the point of being able to toggle the history off?

Before we get into all kinds of conspiracy theories about the evil megacorp lying about what data it keeps, though, I ought to make it clear that when I checked, I found I did not, in fact, have my search history switched off after all. Not on the new account, anyway. Maybe the setting is per channel, not per account. I probably ought to look into that.

It might also explain something I've been wondering about, which is why my recommends on the laptop are so much more consistent than they are on the desktop. It's insidiously comforting, having almost everything that comes be something similar to the things you've already seen. I can see how you could find yourself walled up in a velvet castle of your own making, that way.

It probably also explains why I'm not getting a Recap at all on the Bhagpuss channel, even after i prompt it using the method above. I guess that one does really have the history switched off. I can't say for certain. I haven't been able to find the setting for it yet. 

Then again, I do have an Add-On running in Firefox on the desktop that I don't use on the laptop, which forces YouTube only to show videos from my subscriptions on my home page. That means I get a completely different home page on the two machines anyway, so who knows what's going on?

Whatever it is, I do have a Recap for That Darn Cat and I don't have one for Bhagpuss. The one I've got is extremely limited but also very flattering. Verging on the sycophantic, in fact. It's either been drafted by an AI (Extremely likely.) or by someone trying to sound like one (Worrying, if true.)

I can see why they'd do it, though. I mean, who doesn't want to be told they're a cultured, tech-savvy music lover? All it takes is watching a few music videos and movie trailers (Superhero movies, at that...) and a couple of videos about AI!

It even manages to collate those traits into what would, in an RPG, be called a Class. I'm a Creative Spirit, apparently. Not, you understand, because YouTube knows I've created anything. The Recap doesn't cover anything you've uploaded to your channel. Only what you've watched on other people's. That counts as a creative act to these people.

Speaking of which, I've visited 262 different channels this year. Is that a lot?It doesn't sound like it. I'm surprised it's that few, really. I flip through a couple of dozen most nights. I'd have thought it'd be twice that, at least. I guess there must be a lot of repetition I'm not noticing.

The Recap also tells you which channel you spent most time watching. I'd have liked a Top Ten but no, you just get the one. 

Any guesses what mine was? I certainly wouldn't have got it. In fact, I doubt I would have put it in the top twenty. It was R. Missing. I've watched 31 of her videos and I'm in the top 3% of her audience. Blimey.

All I can say is she does post quite often and I am subbed to her channel so I suppose it shouldn't be that much of a shock. Plus I watch them again when I pick them for posts here and I have posted most things she's done this year. There'll be two of hers in my yearly round-up (Because of course I'm doing one of those, too...)

The only other card that mentions specific channels is a lot harder to explain. Recap attempts, very unconvincingly, to establish some trends in viewing through the year. It pretends I discovered new bands in the Spring, looked for tech tips in the Summer and moved on to watching movie trailers in the Autumn. Which is tripe. I did all of those all year with no particular seasonal emphasis on any of them.

The really odd part, though, is which three "New Bands" Recap chose to highlight: Polly Scattergood, TripleJ and Miami Horror. 

Geez. The only reason I was looking at Polly Scattergood's channel at all was that she hasn't posted anything in four years. I was wondering if she was still alive! As for TripleJ, it's a station, not a band. Granted, it's a music station and I watch bands there but most of them aren't new, even to me. 

Miami Horror, though, really confused me. I had to think for a bit to remember what it was and even then I wasn't sure. They did something with Telenovela that I posted here but it was Telenovela I was mostly interested in, not Miami Horror. I don't recall looking at anything else they've done other than that, so why they get chosen out of the hundreds of acts I must have seen more of this year beats me. What about Witch Post? Or Sunday (1994)? Or Blondshell ffs?

And that's about it for Recap. I'd say I hope YouTube makes a better job of it next year but what I actually hope is that I manage to keep my History switched off and I don't get another one at all. 

It's not like I'll be missing much. 

Or should that be R. Missing much?

To One And All A Merry Christmas

 

And A Merry Christmas To One And All!

 

  

Notes on AI Used In This Christmas Message

Oh, yes, there was some...

First, I took a photo of Beryl, flat out and fast asleep after Christmas Lunch. I cropped and edited it in Paint.net, after which it looked like this:

Then I uploaded it to NightCafe, where I used it as a starting image for Flux Schnell. I gave it the prompt "A sleeping black and white dog wearing a santa hat, surrounded by piles of opened presents under a tastefully decorated Christmas Tree", set the run time to "Long" and asked for four images. The only usable one was this: 

No Santa hat. No tree. One measly present. And that was the best of about a dozen images.

I used several models, trying for something better but they were uniformly terrible. Honestly, it was like the last three years of AI development never happened. I haven't tried generating from an image for a while. I was expecting a lot more. I even used some of my freebies to access the Pro models but they were even worse than the free ones, which ties in with Suno's supposedly best model actually being much worse than its predecessor. 

I think some of these companies are just trying too hard now. Either they're getting desperate or they're so far into the forest they can't see the trees any more.

Anyway, I did manage to get one I was fairly happy with so I uploaded it to ClipChamp. Then I went to Suno and generated some "music" to go with it. That was a low-effort move on my part for which I'd apologize if I didn't also think it fits pretty well with the cheesy effect I was after. 

All I did to get started was type in a half-assed prompt: "Vaporwave Christmas melody, ethereal, glitchy, otherworldy, tuneful, soothing, seasonal, bells, jingling, faint caroling". That gave me something all but unlistenable so I tried to fuzz it up by covering it under the prompt "As heard through the faulty speaker of a  malfunctioning radio, broadcast by a station that fades in and out, quite faint, hard to hear". No luck. The cover sounded pretty much identical to the original. Apparently Suno can't do effects like that.

MeloBytes can, though, so I exported it as a .wav file and uploaded it over there, where I used a filter to make it sound like an old-time radio broadcast. I downloaded the result and uploaded that to ClipChamp. I put the image and the sound file into a timeline, added a couple of effects (Vaporwave and VHS) to get the scratchy, glitchy effect, then I exported the final version to my PC.

I was going to get Blogger to just embed the video directly but the file was too big so I uploaded it to my YouTube channel instead. Once it had processed, I embedded it from there and that was that.

It took me longer to write up this account of what I did than it took me to do it. I probably should have got an AI to do the summary. 

How much of all of that was really AI, though? If I'd been a bit less lazy and made up my own tune and uploaded that, instead of letting Suno do it for me, most of what the "AI" did would have been nothing more than post-processing. Calling it AI just makes it sound more impressive, or so the AI companies would like to believe.

It passed a Christmas afternoon while Mrs Bhagpuss and Bery sleep off their lunch, anyway! Happy Christmas everyone!

Inventory Full Advent Calendar - Day 25 - Christmas Day

I Just Wanna Hold Your Hand 

(On Christmas Day)

The Yearning

C U Christmas Day - Jacklen Ro

It's Like They're Not Even Trying Any More

Following on from yesterday's post, which it has to be admitted somewhat got away from me, here's the one I meant to write about the current state of Prime Gaming. Not that I have anything much to say about it. That's probably how yesterday got started.

Anyway, here's what I've got, such as it is.

It just popped into my head yesterday morning that it'd been a while since I picked up my free games from Prime. The era of Amazon promoting the service in any meaningful way seems to be over. For a while, I used to get emails telling me there was something new to collect. After that, there was the "blog". Now, as far as I can tell, there's nothing.

Actually, if I go back far enough, I seem to remember I used to have to log into Twitch to claim the games, back when it was Twitch Gaming or some such. Or was that just a dream I had? I think that was the reason I made a Twitch account in the first place. To get those free games.

Now it's up to me to remember. I think everyone can guess how that's going to go. 

It also very much looks like the days of a dozen or more free games every month are in the past, too. It's very hard to be sure, without the published monthly slate. The claim dates overlap so I can't tell without going back through the posts here when I registered something was "new". They always did overlap a bit but at least there used to be published start and end dates you could refer to if needed. Now it just says on the offer when it runs out but not when it began.

So, how many new, free games have been added since last time I looked? Good question. Luckily, last time I posted about it, I made a list. There were dates then, I see. I wonder where I got those from? Maybe I'm looking in the wrong place now.

Where I have been looking is on Luna itself, where all of those are still claimable except Lovecraft's Untold Stories and Another World. Those two seem to have vanished, always assuming they were ever really there. I claimed the Borderlands, Fallout and D&D titles I didn't already have and passed on the rest.

On to what seems to be new since last time:

Bo: Path of the Teal Lotus (GOG)

Gunslugs II (GOG)

Christmas Adventure: Candy Storm (Legacy)

Ashworld (GOG)

Gylt (Amazon Games)

They've started using an icon to tell you where you'll be claiming the game from, which works perfectly well for Good Old Games and EPIC, both of whose icons are basically their names. Unfortunately, the others are a picture of a crown and a snowflake, neither of which mean anything to me. 

The crown turns out to be Amazon Games, which still exists independently of Luna, apparently. Or maybe not. I can't tell any more. If you claim a game with a crown on, it says you need Amazon Games installed to play it, anyway, although I suspect when you try to launch the thing it'll go through Luna after all. 

As for the snowflake, I'm guessing that means it's a holiday offer. It's on the only two obviously seasonal games, which would strongly suggest so. I imagine it would tell you for sure if you claimed them but since I don't want either, I can't say for certain. They're both from the hidden object specialist, Legacy Games and they also have the Windows icon so who fricken' knows? Or cares?

The new games I did claim were Ashworld and Gylt, both of which looked quite interesting. I wouldn't have thought so if I'd been paying attention, though.

If I'd had my mind on my work, I wouldn't have bothered claiming Ashworld. I just read the description and grabbed it. 

And why not? It looks great in the splash illustration, doesn't it? Here, take a look. Wouldn't you want to play a game that looked like that?

 

The description makes it sound quite appealing, too. It's an open-world survival game with scavenging, crafting, combat and vehicles. We like those, right? 

Well, yes, we do. Just not when they look like this:

Is that what you were expecting from the picture above? No, me neither. So I won't be playing that one.

Gylt looks more likely to get a run-out sometime. It's "a narrative adventure with stealth, puzzles and action" in which you play Sally, "a little girl living in Bethelwood, Maine". 

Sally's having kind of a bad time just now. "After being chased by a group of bullies, Sally is dragged into a twisted version of her town where her fears and worse memories are presented in a wicked and very real way." 

It's a psychological horror game with surrealist tendencies. Not my favorite sub-genre but I've played and enjoyed a few. It looks pretty and it has an "Overwhelmingly Positive" Steam rating, so definitely worth a shot for free.

 I claimed it, at least. Whether I'll ever play it is another question. Then again, that applies to just about all the games I've ever claimed from Prime under any incarnation.

Will there be more free games in January? No idea. Will I remember to check? Possibly. Do Amazon care if Prime members know any of these games exist? Sure doesn't look like it.

They want us to know about Amazon Music and Audible, though. I get emails about those every blasted week. 

As for games, I think they probably wish they'd never got started on those to begin with.

Inventory Full Advent Calendar - Day 24 - Christmas Eve

 

 

 

 

December 24 (Christmas Song) - Halover

 

December 24 - Earl Sweatshirt

 

Popular Graphic Arts, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons