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.

Three AIs I Use A Lot, Two I Soon Will and One I'll Be Staying The Hell Away From...

As of today, I count more than twenty apps or websites, bookmarked in my AI Tools folder. It feels like I'm adding more every day. 

Most, I treat as toys. Get them out occasionally. Play with them. Put them back. Forget about them for weeks. Others, I use more constructively but also situationally, only when I have something specific I need to do.

There are three that I use regularly, by which I mean just about every day. I'm beginning to lean on all of them, more and more, just to get the posts out.

They are:

Snapedit  

Tipa put me onto this one a few months back and I've come to rely on it heavily. It solves so many problems and saves me so much time. Tough to recall how I got along without it. 

Snapedit gets rid of the stuff you don't want in the picture. You can upload any image and with a few quick sweeps of the mouse erase just about anything that doesn't fit. So far, so Photoshop. Not that I can afford Photoshop but I'm sure there's some free knock-off I could use. If could be bothered to look, which so far I never have. 

That's not the good part, though. The good part is that Snapedit uses AI to fill in the gaps with something that looks right. Right, not perfect. I'm sure no professional commercial artist would want to put their name to it but it's very much good enough for a blog post. 

The huge advantage I see, the reason I use it almost every day, is that I don't have to worry about taking screenshots with the UI on show. I also don't have to pay so much attention to other players or NPCs wandering into shot with their dumb names and guild tags cluttering up the scene. I can just wipe them out with Snapedit.

It must have saved me literally hours already. What with Snapedit and all the post-processing I do in Paint.net, few screenshots I use these days bear close comparison with the originals, let alone the game. Authenticity is so last decade.

Stable Diffusion  (Hugging Face version) 

My current favorite text-to-image generator. There are so many. I used to use Craiyon, which runs off the old Dall-E Mini, but the results, while amusing, weren't always practical. For a while I used the regular Stable Diffusion. It was fine but then it morphed into DreamStudio and that wants money.

Fortunately, there's still an unrestricted version of the original Stable Diffusion 2.1 build running under the rubric of Hugging Face, an open source platform, whose mission is to "Build, train and deploy state of the art models powered by the reference open source in machine learning." Snappy. That's what I'm using to produce most of the AI-generated images you see in posts here nowadays.

I like Stable Diffusion mostly because it's simple, fast and gives reliably accurate results. In sets of four big pictures. I can usually get at least one I like on the first or second try. They fit very nicely on the blog without much editing. The AI is responsive to prompts on style, reliably returning 50s magazine illustrations or 70s comic book art without needing a lot of tweaks or instruction.

It has the most minimal of interfaces. All you do is type a sentence or a phrase. You can also add a negative instruction to avoid results you don't want. There's an "Advanced" toggle but all that gets you is a slider that affects the Guidance Scale, the degree to which the AI follows the prompt. I generally leave that where it is.

Best of all, it's completely free for unrestricted use. Can't ask for more.

Bard

Bard is Google's chatbot. It's one of the Big Three, the others being ChatGPT+ and Microsoft's Bing. Of the three, I strongly prefer Bard, even though ChatGPT+ is definitely more versatile and Bing probably more accurate. 

The increasingly noticeable issue with ChatGpt+ is that it was trained exclusively on a data set that was gathered prior to September 2021. It's never been updated. Since most of what I want to ask relates to current events, that makes it fairly useless and getting more so by the day. 

I would always go to ChatGPT+ first for AI-generated fiction. I think it does a more creative job making stuff up than the others. Fiction is rarely what I need for the blog, though. 

Usually I want a precis of some news item or story to save time paging through multiple web pages. Bing can bring the data and quote the source but it seems to me to be nothing more than a minimally-enhanced search engine. An enhanced version of a search engine I would never normally use, at that. If I wanted to click on links and read primary sources I'd stick to Google Search.

Bard is a lot closer to the kind of AI-driven research assistant I'm looking for. It's chatty and friendly and communicates in reasonably demotic English. It offers opinions and suggestions, which I find both amusing and helpful. Bard also likes the sound of its own voice and never stints on the quantity, whereas Bing always acts like it's got better things to do with its time than chat and has to pay for every word out of its lunch money.

I can often quote whole paragraphs from Bard verbatim, although so far I've stopped short of just dropping one in and pretending I wrote it. That day is coming though, count on it, if only so I can see if anyone notices and calls me out.

The problem with using Bard as a research assistant - and it's a very big problem indeed - is that when it doesn't know something it's more than happy to make it up. Worse still, when challenged it's most likely to double down and insist it's right, trash-talking anyone that claims otherwise.

In this way I suspect its even more like an actual research assistant - some slacker with a know-nothing boss who can't tell and wouldn't care anyway. But I can tell. Every time Bard tells me something I don't already know, I go check with Bard's prissy elder sibling, Google. 

Still makes using Bard much quicker than going to Google right off the bat. Mostly, when I ask Bard to give me chapter and verse on something, it's because I already know most of the details. I just want them laid out neatly for me. Bard is good at that. It just needs watching. Closely.

Those are the three AI services I rely on but more are coming on stream every day. Here come two more I plan on using pretty often in days and weeks to come - and one I don't plan on using at all.

NightCafe

I can't remember how I came across NightCafe, even though it can only have been a few days ago. Insert Ferris Bueller quote here. It's yet another text-to-image generator but one that comes with a wide array of ready-to-use filters, everything from anime to neo-impressionism. Handy timesaver but more important is the way NightCafe allows you to produce linked sequences of images, each new one iterating on the last. 

Very useful for making slideshow videos but also for illustrating blog posts on a theme. I expect to be using this one often although how often depends on how many free Credits I can snag. 

The payment system operates on tokens, boringly called Credits. The number of iterations you can generate costs a set number of tokens. A single image is free but multiple iterations cost .25 of a credit each. The stages available are 4, 9 or 16.

You can buy credits either in packs or through a variety of monthly subscriptions but you can also earn them for free by doing various things that feel eerily similar to dailies in an mmorpg. Without doing anything much at all, I managed to generate more than enough credits for the images I needed yesterday and right now I have eighteen and a half credits left. Where the half came from I have no idea.

If I can keep myself supplied with enough free credits I'll be visiting the NightCafe often. 

Uncrop

I found this one yesterday, when I was looking for an image generator that could output results in landscape format. All the text-to-image generators I've tried like either square or grid or portrait format, none of which is ideal.

I wasn't having much luck finding one. Googling "Text-to-image generators - landscape format" mostly gets links to apps that generate landscapes. As I was going through the possibles I chanced upon Uncrop, which kinda-sorta solved my immediate issue even though it didn't match the search terms at all.

Uncrop is a new app from Clipdrop. Clipdrop is a more sophisticated Snapedit. it runs on Windows, Android and iOS. It has a free version but you have to take a watermark, which pretty much makes it useless for the intended purpose, I'd say.

Uncrop, for the moment at least, comes free with no watermark. You need to register an email address to get more than a few turns but I did all of this post with it and it hasn't asked me for money yet. It's an "Aspect Ratio Editor". Allegedly "The Ultimate Aspect Ratio Editor". I wouldn't know. It's the only Aspect Ratio Editor I've ever seen.

The website says it can "change the ratio of any image by creating an expanded background to complement any existing photo or image". Sounds fancy. What it actually does is use Stable Diffusion to generate supposedly suitable images to fill the extra space created when you specify a different size of canvas.

I think the idea is to make the end result look like a single, seamless whole. Mostly it works although it has a habit of throwing in completely off-topic elements, like the leaping duck and friends in the picture above. Sometimes it just adds panels on either side of the original to create a tryptych. Whatever it does, for my purposes the results I'm getting are absolutely fine.

And finally, one I almost feel guilty mentioning. Do not take this as any kind of recommendation. It's more of a warning as well as a foretaste of things to come. 

Paraphrasingtool

This is far and away the dodgiest suite of tools I've found so far. It's obviously meant for academic and professional use, by which I mean students who don't want to write their own essays and journalists who don't want to write their own copy. And bloggers, too, obviously.

It's priced accordingly but there's a free option. You get 20,000 characters free but it doesn't say if that's a one-off deal or if it's 20k every so many hours, days, weeks or months. That's for the main function, paraphrasing. There are lots of specialised subfunctions, too, some of which cost, some of which come free.

There wouldn't seem to be any immediate reason to use this set-up over ChatGPT+ or Bard, both of which are perfectly capable of banging out a thousand words of artless twaddle on any topic you care to give them, except that the awkwardly-named Paraphrasingtool (It really needs to paraphrase itself.) comes with a bunch of presets that save you the trouble of laying out your terms of reference beforehand.

I was there because I'd googled "AI Podcast Generators" and I'd done that because I'd seen an article suggesting there was about to be a glut of podcasts written and voiced by AIs and I wanted to see if I could get in on the act. I haven't found an app yet that claims to be able to do the whole thing - produce a fully-voiced podcast from a single line of text - but I've gotten it down to two stages, of which this is the first.

I got PPT's (Not typing that stupid name out every time.) Podcast Script Generator to write me the script for a podcast on SW:TOR's move to Broadsword. Then I had Elevenlabs voice it for me. 

The script was dull and factually inaccurate but so are most podcasts. It was at least formatted correctly and useable straight out of the box, provided you didn't expect anyone to enjoy listening to it. It was also about three times too long for Elevenlabs free service so the audiofile I made cuts off in the middle of a sentence. It's a blessed relief.

I could have cut and pasted and edited my way to a complete and finished version but why would I? No-one would ever listen to it, not even me. The point was to prove concept and the truncated version did that just fine. Here it is on my YouTube channel. I don't recommend listening to it out of anything other than curiosity.

 

PPT has presets for all kinds of short-form writing, from poetry to cover letters. It can offer you Blog Ideas and Blog Outlines and even a Blog Generator. All of them are free. I haven't tried any. I don't plan on trying any. If I ever do try any, I won't be talking about it.

Curiously, there are also presets both for detecting content written by AIs and for bypassing other apps designed to do the same. Got you covered going both ways, there. I can imagine either of those getting plenty of use as the AI wars heat up.

Which they undoubtedly will. These are just the opening skirmishes. This isn't the mythical metaverse or numbskull NFTs or crappy crypto we're talking about. AI's not going to be forgotten in a week or two, when the next dumb idea shows up. 

No, this is the actual future, like it or not and we're all going to need a good set of tools if we're going help build it - or hide from it. These are just a few of mine. Happy to share!

And I'm always looking to add some more, so if you find any good ones, don't keep them to yourselves.

Are We There Yet?

Not that I want to obsess about it but the news just  keeps  coming. I know these hype trains roll around with tedious regularity, only to end up shunted off into some cultural siding, rusting reminders of promises unfulfilled, but occasionally one just keeps picking up speed and momentum until it's hard to hear anything above the singing of the rails as it speeds by on its way to the future.

While many of the claims being made may be overstated, many of the reports exaggerated, there are already so many active applications of the process in play it would take a major effort of will to deny the reality that's already upon us. The future can look after itself; this is the present talking.

Of course, just as with most of the insanely over-optimistic claims made on behalf of the metaverse, much of what's being said and written about AI is pure nonsense. Whatever merits either may have are not helped by the crazed, evangelistic language and wildly hyperbolic assertions made by their most fervent supporters.

The evidence, however, speaks for itself. For the imaginary metaverse so heavily promoted by shills for crypto and blockchain, sad, deluded failures like Decentraland do service as the very opposite of proof of concept,offering up ruined monuments to greed, hubris and self-delusion, as Dan Olson's lengthy and entertaining takedown takes almost too much pleasure in describing. Meanwhile, anguished, aggrandized pleas for recognition of AI sentience come across more as cries for help from those that make them than any remotely objective assessment of current technological capability.

It's all too easy in the current, fevered climate to make assumptions that lurch too far to the extreme, to believe it's either all a crock or a scam or a farce or the singularity or the apocalypse. It's none of these things. Then again, I'm not going to be the one to assure you there aren't crooks, scammers and farceurs at work here too. They're always with us.

Backtracking just a little, where I would take issue with Dan Olson is in his rubbishing of the notion that to believe the metaverse is already here is in some way to give in to vaguery that renders the term meaningless. Nope. It's here alright. Like AI, the metaverse is observably present. It just doesn't look like the photos in its press pack.

The metaverse is clearly the worldwide web we all use every day. It already fulfills all of the necessary criteria - instant communication anywhere at any time with anyone; immediate access to services and products; communal virtual spaces; avatars, abstracts, anonymity. The pieces are in place. The only thing that's likely or that needs to change substantively is our mode of access which, as Dan rightly explains, will not magically arrive as a world filled with people happily strapping half-bricks to their foreheads.

Virtual reality of the kind imagined by its zealots will have to wait for technical solutions several orders of magnitude more strange and rare than anything we've seen so far. My own feeling is that we're far more likely to adopt something along the lines of the augmented reality seen in The Expanse, where schematics replace flat screens via a form of projection, than anything like Star Trek's holodeck, but there's no need for either. The flat screens we have now will do just fine.

As the metaverse turns out to be nothing more than a fanciful rebranding of the digital revolution that began thirty years ago, so AI may end up being nothing more exotic than a collection of software we employ to reduce the amount of tedious busywork we've been mislabeling "creativity" for far too long. Ever since the industrial revolution, engineers have been automating processes that used to require manual labor; now the software engineers are getting in on the act.

Much of the negativity I've seen concerning the advance of generative AI into areas previously handled by low-wage, low-status workers has revolved around the inherent uselessness of the product itself. The argument seems to be that AIs are only capable of churning out reams of twaddle, which might well be used to replace the twaddle previously produced by people at a much slower and costlier rate, and that this is somehow a bad thing because it will put the twaddlers out of a job.  

At best it seems like something of a circular argument. If we don't value the output, why do we value the means of its production? And if we consider producing it a worthwhile way for someone to earn a living, why do we not value the work they produce? Is it humanitarian to want to reserve an occupation for human use so those without better prospects can keep themselves alive by producing work no-one wants or values?

Don't look at me. I did English. I think you want a philosophy grad or a sociologist or maybe even an economist. I just find it a bit unconvincing as an argument, that's all, which may well be because I don't know what I'm talking about. Wouldn't be the first time.

I also don't find it all that interesting. I'm not that bothered about who writes copy I don't read for  websites I don't visit. AIs or interns, it's all a bit too abstract for me.

A fight in which I do have more of a dog, and one which ought to be of particular interest to residents of this part of the blogosphere, might be the potential incursion of AI into gaming. There's been some talk of that of late, not least in the abrupt redirection of resources intended for the "social mmorpg" Galaxies of Eden into a business dedicated instead to "the creation of cybernetic beings and eventually infinite virtual universes."

I first read about this at MassivelyOP, where the tone of the reporting was decidedly cool. I'm used to MOP being heavily down on anything AI or metaverse adjacent, so I went directly to the source to make up my own mind. In this case I think I'd have to acknowledge the sarcasm and disdain is probably justified. I refer you to the embedded video in the linked page if you require further convincing.

It's my feeling that generative AI will come to play a substantial role in the making of video games, especially rpgs. The two seem to be made for each other. Far from feeling apprehensive about how they might interact, I'm very keen to see them strike sparks off each other. I do not, however, believe that, as claimed by the developers of Galaxies of Eden, "We are now at the precipice of attaining true AI sentience and infinite content generation". In your dreams.

They also claim to have "managed to craft a crudely sentient cybernetic being", something I more than doubt, even with the most generous definitions of "sentient" and "being". Or "crudely", for that matter. As usual, there seems to be a self-destructive desire to run at breakneck speed into the future, not just before mastering walking but at the very moment when the first, tottering steps are being taken.

A much more reasoned and objective experiment with AI integration in an mmo - or in this case a text-based MUD - was reported by New World Notes, a blog that styles itself "The world's longest-running metaverse news and culture site." I won't attempt to precis the full article; it's worth reading in full, including the transcripts of some of the ChatGPT-generated NPC conversations that took place in game. They are impressive, at least if you're the kind of person who'd normally impressed by roleplayers larking around. 

If nothing else, it demonstrates that ChatGPT can certainly improvise as well as most casual roleplayers, admittedly not the highest of bars. As Matt Mihaly of Iron Realms, the company behind Aetolia, the MUD in question, makes abundantly clear, however, any widespread integration between commercially available generative AI programs and mmos would be prohibitively expensive right now. 

What probably wouldn't be either impractical or costly, however, would be asking something like Chat GPT or Bard to write static quests. In fact, why speculate? In the immortal words of Luci from Disenchantment, as recorded on the T-shirt I'm wearing right now... Just Do It!

My prompt: 

 

"Here is an example of how quest dialog is formulated in EverQuest II:

(Which I've cut because it's far too long for the post - I used the first section of dialog here if you really want to know.)

Here is the structure of a short quest in the game:

" Speak to Gherrana Cobbleblork at the Highland Outposts to begin this quest. She asks you to "gather some feathers from the kragploom aviaks".

    Kill 10 of any type of Kragplooms.
        The closest ones are Kragploom chicks in The Highlands.
        More Kragplooms can be found on top of Kragploom Butte north-northeast of The Highlands. ( 91,223,197 )

Return to Gherrana for your reward. "

Please construct a short quest for the game in which a non-player character asks a player character to go somewhere and do something for them in similar style. Include names and some dialog to give the quest flavor.

 

And here's Bard's response:

"Sure, here is a short quest for EverQuest II:

Quest Name: The Lost Key

Quest Giver: Agnar the Smith

Location: The Commonlands

Quest Description:

Agnar the Smith has lost his key to his workshop. He asks you to find it for him.

Quest Steps:

1. Speak to Agnar the Smith in the Commonlands.
2. Go to the nearby cave and search for the key.
3. Return the key to Agnar the Smith.

Reward:

100 platinum pieces

Dialog:

• You say, "Hail, Agnar the Smith."

• Agnar the Smith says, "Greetings, traveler. What can I do for you today?"

• You say, "I've heard you lost your key."

• Agnar the Smith sighs. "Yes, I did. I was working on a new sword when I accidentally dropped it into the nearby cave. I've looked everywhere, but I can't seem to find it."

• You say, "I'll go look for it."

• Agnar the Smith smiles. "Thank you, traveler. I'll be forever in your debt."

• You go to the nearby cave and search for the key. After a few minutes, you find it on the ground near a pile of rocks.

• You return to Agnar the Smith.

• You say, "I found your key."

• Agnar the Smith is overjoyed. "Thank you so much! I don't know what I would have done without you."

• Agnar the Smith gives you 100 platinum pieces.

• Agnar the Smith says, "Please, take this as a token of my gratitude."

• You say, "You're welcome. I'm glad I could help."

That took Bard about five seconds and can anyone honestly say its substantively inferior to any run-of-the-mill mmorpg quest? If anything, it already assumes too much backstory compared to the average "Fetch" quest. 

 

I'm not suggesting the EQII team would be able to copy and paste the whole thing into the game verbatim - you probably wouldn't want to be handing out 100 platinum pieces for a Commonlands quest, for a start and I'm not sure where the cave might be - but I am saying it wouldn't require much more than a little tidying up before it could be slotted in alongside most of the existing low-level quests in that zone without anyone being any the wiser.

To my mind, it's not a matter of having AIs replace designers or writers so much as giving those people a powerful new tool that could make their work a lot easier - and quicker. If nothing else, it ought to make a big difference to those one-dev shops I keep reading about.

 

Maybe we will eventually be able to leave the AIs to it and all just sit back and consume what they produce but long before that paradisaical day arrives I suspect we'll be enjoying their human-moderated output without even realizing.

Much the way we spend much of our time in the metaverse every day of our lives right now.

Sound And Vision

I can't remember exactly when I first saw the tag "Visualizer" appended to a YouTube video but it feels like it must have been a few years ago, now. It was definitely well before I started noticing the equally sinister attribution "Distrokid" or the disturbing "CDBaby". Once I'd become aware of them, though, I couldn't stop seeing them everywhere.

It took a while but eventually I cracked and googled Distrokid. It was obviously some kind of distribution network but as to its provenance or authority I had nothing. Turns out it's about as unsinister as a faceless corporation can be. In case anyone else hasn't been able to find the ten seconds necesary to crack the code, Distrokid is "the easiest way for musicians to get music into Spotify, Apple, Amazon, Tidal, TikTok, YouTube, and more." Their words, obviously. 

It's not free but it's cheap at $19.99 a year for unlimited digital distribution to all those platforms, per artist. CDBaby's deal is based on per-item pricing. If I had something to sell I'm sure I'd end up using one or the other.

I don't, though, so that's about as far as I'm going with that story. Curiosity satisfied. Job done. 

And for a while, I thought I had the whole visualizer thing pegged, too. It was just some cheap-looking automated animation process that jiggles the screen or generates waveforms in response to an audio signal. It was clearly being used by people without either the time or the resources to make a proper video, although given you can make one on a phone in about the same time it takes to play the damn song, it's hard to imagine who those people might be.

If I'm not misremembering, there used to be something like it, built into whatever audio software we all used back in the 90s. I seem to recall you could have your monitor throw graphic shapes every time you played a soundfile or a CD. It was fun for five minutes but the novelty wore off fast.

The problem with that analysis was the increasing sophistication of the videos flying the "Visualizer" flag. When I first noticed them they were extremely basic - infinity tunnels, shimmering starfields, wobbling text, that kind of thing. Nothing you'd ever actually sit and watch, just some movement to make you feel you weren't stuck with a static image, something which I have to admit does make me move on to another "video" pretty damn fast when I'm surfing YouTube.

As time went on, the imagery started to become more nuanced. There were occasions where I did indeed watch a visualizer as though it had genuine content. Even so, I can't remember seeing one that made me think "Hang on, how is this not an actual video that someone's scripted, performed, directed and edited?" And then this morning I watched this:

That's Cuchillos by the excellent Lisasinson. It's also what I'd call "a video" but their record company, Elefant Records, don't agree. They've officially tagged it as a "Visualizer".

That does seem to blur the boundaries somewhat. I'd have been willing to bet that all the imagery in the video (Which is what I'm going to call it.) had been shot specifically for the occasion. It's a bet I'd lose, as will soon be revealed...

The lyrics are in Spanish, a language in which I can pick my way through a newspaper but don't speak nearly well enough to understand what they're singing. Fortunately, Elefant have thoughtfully provided a full transcript, which I ran through Google Translate, allowing me to affirm that, yes, the imagery in the video is specific to the import of the song. I mean, the bloody title of the thing in English  is "Knives" and the chorus runs

I do not want to hurt you
My knives are not for you

It's not even until halfway through that video the imagery even begins to repeat. It wasn't until I'd seen the whole thing and formed my interpretation that I found out much of it is recycled from another visualizer the band released about three months ago, for their last single Últimamente. That one looks even more like a fully-scripted video, though. Far from undermining my argument, I think it reinforces it.

I was really at loss to understand why either had the Visualizer tag at all, so finally I broke down and googled the whole concept.

Plenty of people seemed keen to explain it to me, although since the British-English spelling of the word (Visualiser) refers to a specific piece of office equipment, not all of them were helpful. Once I'd got my esses and zees sorted out, I found this from 2017, when the phenomenon appeared to be relatively new.

As Aliya Chaudry from 34th Street magazine puts it:

"A visualizer seems to be a simplistic visual intended to accompany a song, much like a music video or lyric video, and it’s a new trend. They tend to be less developed and fully–fledged than music videos, which often have more complicated visuals or a plot and characters. This term could come from music visualizers, software which produce graphics in response to audio, like Windows Media Player. This means that by calling their video clips “visualizers,” artists are arguing that this is the visual representation of their audio pieces."

So, pretty much what I always thought. Aliya also seems to be pushing the alternative term "Visualette". Thankfully, that never caught on, although a quick google search does show a lingering, residual usage. The article also makes the valid point that visualizers are often released as placeholder videos before a full video is available, something I've often seen. 

Less prescient is the idea that visualizers might replace lyric videos or the speculation that they "could just be another weird new trend in music." Five years on, I think we can safely say lyric videos aren't going anywhere and visualizers are here to stay.

Having confirmed the definition, I began to wonder about the source. I'm sure a band like Lisasinson, signed to a large indie label like Elefant, have all the resources they need to make videos or visualizers but what about the rest of us? Is there somewhere you can bang one of these things out at home, for free?

Yes, of course there is. More than one. Here's a list of the top eight. (Weird cut-off point. Who compiled that list? A spider?) I didn't see that one until after I'd done a basic Google search of my own. The top results in that were Veed and Renderforest. I picked the latter purely because of more mellifluous name.

Since I don't - for reasons that would take far too long to go into now - have any original music of my own available to upload, I grabbed a copyright-free MP3 from Pixabay. I combined that with a screenshot from my vast horde and slapped them together. To avoid stretching both Renderforest's freebie size limits and the patience of anyone foolish enough to watch the thing, I cut a short segment out of the audiofile using Audacity, limiting the whole thing to a tidy sixteen seconds or so.

Including the time it took me to find all the component parts, work out how to use Renderforest, remember how to use Audacity, run through the four-stage process and complete the project, it took me no more than twenty minutes to make two test samples. 

They may not be much (Okay, there's no "may" about it.) but as proof of concept they do what they need to. If I had to knock another of these out, say for an actual song, I reckon I could do it faster than I can drink a cup of coffee. Give me a couple of hours, I could probably make one I wouldn't be ashamed to have other people see.

As with most of these technological possibilities, chances are I'll never get around to using it for anything much, although I do have a few ideas.... As for writing about it, I realize I'm a good five years past the time anyone cared. Still, you never know when new knowledge is going to come in useful. 

I mean, I use that AI photo editing site Tipa put me on to a while back pretty much ever day. And does anyone even notice?

Smile And Grin At The Change All Around

There's been a lot of talk these last few days about Elon Musk's grudging acquisition of Twitter. If I'm honest, most of it would probably have passed me by if it hadn't been for the occasional, tangentially-related news item popping up on my music feeds and a couple of posts from Belghast and Wilhelm on my blog roll.

I'm gradually learning more about Elon Musk, someone who, in the rare event I ever thought about him at all, I used only to know as "that guy that Grimes had a thing with, once". As for Twitter, other than when I follow links from articles to something someone's said there, my only real connection to the service ended more than a dozen years ago, when I stopped playing Echo Bazaar, the game that went on to become better known as Fallen London.

Failbetter Games, the developers behind that game and its quasi-sequels Sunless Sea and Sunless Skies, went with the original and highly annoying idea of requiring a Twitter handle as login credentials. Twitter at the time was fairly new, having been around for something like three years, and I guess some people still thought it was cute. 

Wildstar, then in development, tried to jump the bandwagon by claiming its nascent quest system would be "directly influenced by Twitter". As Carbine's senior narrative designer Cory Herndon put it, "No one likes writing text that doesn’t get read, and getting our players to read what we write is a challenge we take seriously."

As it turned out, wordy quest text was the least of Wildstar's problems and Twitter itself went on to double its maximum Tweet load from the 140 characters Carbine were copying to a bloated 280, although according to a 2018 press release, few took them up on the expansive offer. Apparently most people can say all they want in fewer than forty characters. Would that I were one of them.

My own Twitter history comprises literally nothing other than automated Tweets put out by the aforementioned Echo Bazaar. That was a very annoying thing some games did back then, sending messages to your mother to let her know you'd just earned the title "Goblin Slayer" for killing your five thousandth goblin. I'm assuming no games do that any more, based on how unpopular a feature it used to be.

Regardless of my own lack of interest in using it myself, changes in how Twitter operates do have the potential to affect me indirectly by dint of the bizarre way everyone from the Leader of the Free World (Archaic term; popular in the last century, now only of historic interest except when used ironically.) to my energy suppliers seem to believe tweeting is the exact equivalent of sending a personalised letter. If Elon, as widely anticipated, unleashes the barbarian hordes, signal to noise ratio will degrade for everyone, whether they participate or not.

The post-acquisition trajectory for Twitter is very far from certain, of course. The damn thing has never made money, has it? Actually, yes it has. Twice. "Twitter has posted a net loss every year, except 2018 and 2019 when it made a profit of just over $1 billion." Most of that money comes from advertizing although some comes from "data licensing and services".

As Kanye West has discovered to his enormous cost recently, if you make your brand sufficiently toxic by things you do or say, people no longer want their names associated with yours. It's a fair bet Elon won't make the same kind of statements that have reduced Ye's net worth from $2b (A figure disputed by Ye, who claimed it was double that.) to a mere $400m and startled some of his fans into seeing him as a potential charity case but if, as some anticipate, his ownership shifts the appearance of Twitter to the public eye into something not much more than the in-house journal of the alt-right, there may be some sensitivity to bleed-over in marketing departments around the globe.

One frequently-voiced response to all of this is to withdraw from the fray, either in a scorched earth, delete all social media accounts and buy a fountain pen kind of extreme reaction or a more nuanced and tentative retreat into the more genteel, guarded, often siloed grounds of lesser-known platforms like Mastodon or Hive Social. (No, me neither, until today.)

Much better-known options like Discord, Reddit and even Tik-Tok also come up as possible bolt-holes but really nothing else is anything like Twitter. I know that and I don't even use it.

What seems far more likely to me than any of the already extant services picking up Twitter's slack is the eventual appearance of some entirely new entity that will do to Twitter what Facebook did to MySpace. It's far too easy for people to see existing cultural monoliths as eternal and irreplaceable, when all the evidence suggests they'll be replaced and forgotten with ease. 

I'll be perfectly happy to see Twitter fade but I'm less sanguine about the futures of other services I value more. Blogger, owned and operated as it is by Google, is always at risk but my inspiration for this post was a change to another Google service that's a lot further up the megacorp's attention scale: YouTube.

As I've made plain many times, I use YouTube a lot. It's my primary source of new music and a strong contributor of factual information and entertainment. I wouldn't have had the nerve to cut Beryl's dog walk light-up necklace to size without first watching a tutorial on YouTube.

I also have a YouTube channel, which I don't use for much, other than some occasional whimsy here on the blog. Until now, that channel has gone by the name of the Google account with which I made it, the tautologous Bhagpuss Bhagpuss. It might sound like a nod to the mighty Duran Duran but it is in fact the highly unimaginitive choice I made a long time ago, when Google briefly decided everyone had to register under their real name and rather than do that I just added a second "Bhagpuss" as my surname, which seemed to suit Google just fine.

Because Google, in common with every tech company, can never leave well enough alone, this morning I received my final notification by email that my new, mandatory "Channel Handle" had been assigned. There is the option to choose one of your own but if, like me, you can't be bothered becauase you don't care, one will be assigned to you. 

I was curious to see what mine was so I clicked through the link to find out. And I was pretty happy with it. That was a surprise.

My handle is now @TheBhagpuss and my YouTube channel is youtube.com/@TheBhagpuss. That, I have to say, is an improvement. I kind of like being The Bhagpuss rather than just plain old Bhagpuss, let alone the somewhat comical "Bhagpuss Bhagpuss".

So, let's take what encouragement we can from this unusual example of an imposed change actually making something better. It can happen! 

Now I just have to remember to use my new handle for... something. That's going to be the hard part.

When I'm 64.

This might just set a record for the shortest post I've ever written.

I just logged into EverQuest II. There'd been an update, as there is every Tuesday. The servers were up but there was a small patch so I clicked through to read the notes.

The top line reads "The EverQuest II client and server architecture have been updated to 64-bit with this update." I'd forgotten all about that.

As a long-serving mmorpg player, naturally I expected problems, issues, maybe even chaos. Nope. Nothing. Smooth as ice cream.

I couldn't really tell much difference but then I'm not really sure what improvements or benefits I'm supposed to be getting from the change in architecture. It did seem that my loading times, when the load was using data from the client, were very quick but then that was never much of a bottleneck for me. 

Where I get delays sometimes is in the parts where the server sends new zone data to the client. I don't think that has much to do with whether there are 32 bits or 64. It it seems the same as ever to me. 

I'll keep an eye on it when I do something a bit more challenging than setting my Overseer missions or  putting crafting mats into my storage depots. When the next holiday, Scorched Sky, arrives on Thursday, maybe the new dungeon or Public Quest, if there is one, might be a better test.

Anyway, I just thought I'd mention it. It's nice to see something go the way it's supposed to, for once. Credit where it's due - a big Well Done! to Daybreak and their engineers.

The Magic Touch

Today I heard some sad news. Apple is about to discontinue the iPod. According to the report on Pitchfork, the iPod Touch will remain available in the Apple Store and via authorised retailers until current stocks are exhausted and then that will be it.

I bought my iPod Touch twelve years ago and it's still working perfectly. Until Covid put a stop to my regular commute (Mrs Bhagpuss started driving me to and from work during the pandemic so as to avoid travelling on public transport and we've stayed with that since.) I listened to podcasts or music on the Touch several days a week.

Even though there are many more obvious ways to listen to music these days, until this year I'd been in the habit of ripping new CDs to the iPod and listening to them that way. It's only in the last few months I finally decided to stop, mostly because the 32GB drive was so full I had to choose something to delete every time I wanted to add a new purchase.

The iPod Touch wasn't my first MP3 player. That was a Creative Zen Nano I bought in 2006. It had an amazing 512Mb of storage and an am/fm radio. I used it a lot and was very happy with it until I filled it up, which as you can imagine didn't take long. 

The Touch wasn't even my first MP4 player. That was a Sony Walkman with 4GB storage and a two-inch screen. I downloaded videos to it and watched them in my lunchbreak. I watched the whole of the first series of The Trip with Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon on that matchbox-sized screen and it was perfectly fine.

Good though those players were, it was the iPod Touch that really sold me on the whole mini-computer in your pocket deal. It had a wifi connection and you could watch YouTube and browse the internet. I even used my Touch on holiday to find and book hotel rooms on the fly.

You could play mmorpgs on it, too. I still have Celtic Heroes installed, a game I played and wrote about back at the dawn of the blog. 

The operating software on my ancient device has long been superceded by newer versions of iOS and it's been something of a struggle to get iTunes and my iPod to play nicely together for a while but we muddle along. I could have replaced it long ago, of course, either with an iPhone or a newer model but why spend the money when it still does everything I need? It still works better than most other tablets and devices I've had.

I've never been a fan of Apple. I don't like iOS or iTunes and I find the reputation for user-friendliness of both quite laughable. Nevertheless, I am a huge fan of the iPod Touch. It's always done just what I wanted and it's never let me down. The twelve-year old battery still holds enough charge for a couple of days and I can find things on it without wanting to throw it across the room.

I guess I could jump before I'm pushed and buy one of the remaining newest models before they disappear for good. On the evidence of the one I have, a replacement could well outlive me.

They're viciously expensive, though, and as I said I've finally reached the point where I don't use mine as much as I did. It's past the point where buying another would make any sense. I'll probably just let the one I have drift on until it stops, much like I plan to do.

To commemorate the passing of an icon, I thought I'd use the function I treasured back in the days of the commute: the iPod Shuffle. I'm going to shuffle and post the first five songs that come up that I can also find on YouTube. I promise not to edit for coolness or to prevent embarrassment. If I was willing to put them on I ought to be willing to show them off. 

Here goes...

Never Say Never - That Dog 

Oh, wow! That's so cool! I didn't even know that was on there. I don't own any albums by That Dog but I went through a phase of converting all the music videos I downloaded from YouTube into MP3s and uploading those to the iPod. Didn't we have it a while back? I should have put that in the rules - no repeats of tracks I've used on the blog before. I didn't, so tough. No-one's going to remember anyway. I don't, even.

Let's roll the dice again...

Some Kinda Love  - The Velvet Underground (Version 2 - The Matrix Tapes)... and it's not on YouTube. Version 4 is but not 2, for some reason. 

Try again...

Ghosts - Motel Raphael

Geez! I forgot that even existed! I barely remember hearing it the first time. I have absolutely no idea who they are (Turns out they're from Montreal) and as far as I recall that's the only thing of theirs I ever heard. Their Bandcamp is still active but the newest thing on there is a couple of years old. I used to like to listen to a lot of stuff that sounded like this. Still do, if I'm in the mood.

Okay, come in number three...

My Alibi (Piano Version) - Lloyd Cole

I guess the law of averages was with Lloyd. I have a bunch of his albums on here, after all. This is from the outtakes and demos collection, self-deprecatingly named Cleaning Out The Ashtrays and once again I'd forgotten all about it. My Alibi is one of my favorite later Lloyd Cole tunes but I wouldn't say this is my favorite version. More of a curio, really, although I do like the weird, otherworldly coda. Here's the original by way of comparison.

Two more...

Suicide Club - The Modernettes

I have a suspicion these guys are Canadian, too... yep, Vancouver, formed in 1980... I bought a double CD of theirs after watching a bunch of their stuff on YouTube but I don't think I've ever listened to it all the way through. I'm not sure you'd get away with a line like "Down at the Suicide Club/That's where the girls are" nowadays.

Last cast... here's hoping it's a good one...

run - pennybirdrabbit

Aahhhhhhhhhhh! <Screams with joy!> Oh, come on!, That's a result, right? Another great song I totally don't remember and with a great video I don't remember either. This is exactly why I love my iPod Touch so much and why no other device I own really hits the spot. Have you ever tried to get a PC  to shuffle the contents of a folder? I have and it wasn't pretty.

God Bless the iPod Touch! May it never truly die.