Points That You Can Score

Let’s talk about something different this week - two transcendental moments in computer games. One a long time ago, one as late as this week.

Games based around pop bands were not exactly filling the shelves in the 80s, but they were more common than you’d might expect in the heyday of the UK computer game market. And given that most licensed titles chase the cash before the fad dies down, you’d be forgiven if you thought Frankie Goes To Hollywood1 would be something like “DJ Mike Read has stolen the master tapes to Relax! Find the tapes in five levels of platforming action! Absolutely brilliant!

Instead, you play as a Nobody in Mundanesville, a suburb of Liverpool, determined to become a Real Person and enter the Pleasuredome. But of course you do. But while the open world you are exploring seems to be a never-ending set of identical terraced houses on similar streets, a different world is hidden in full view - by interacting with the objects within houses (lamps, TVs, etc), you trigger portals sending you into abstract mini games, where you will bounce symbols into energy barriers, take part in a shooting range of world leaders, try to rebuild the ZTT logo, defend Liverpool from air attacks in WW2, or race along an infuriating set of pot holes that transport you to another part of the screen. And every time you succeed in one of your tasks, Frankie will award pleasure points. You need 99,000 of them to enter the Pleasuredome.

FRANKIE SAYS!

It is, in short, completely bewildering and mesmerizing. An open world computer game in 1985, where the mundanity of the real world can give way to the fantastic in a matter of seconds. The developers, Denton Designs, were formed from the core of Imagine after that company went bust with their grandiose Bandersnatch designs, and the game actually has a lineage of code stemming back to that original failed effort via their first game for Ocean, Gift From The Gods. One thing that I have been curious about over the past few decades is: just how much input did Paul Morley have on this? Because if you sat down and thought about what sort of obtuse game the Morley of 1985 would come up with, this is exactly what he’d do2.

Annihilation Mix

About half-way through the game and you’ve got a handle on things. You’re playing these mini games, picking up useful objects, increasing your stats. And then you enter a house, just like all the other houses. Twenty-seven churches and silver birches. But there’s a dead body in the sitting room. And suddenly the game becomes a whodunnit. The game doesn’t really change that much - only that when you enter houses or rooms, you might now get clues on all the possible suspects, but it absolutely electrified me as a seven-year-old, building up a web of suspects while trying my hardest to become a Real Person3 on my Spectrum4.

This week, No Man’s Sky. I’m still very much in the early game on the Switch, trying to scrape together credits and building a small, respectable base (we won’t talk about my first attempt, which was a wooden structure built on a hill that you had to use a jetpack to even get to the door). Anyway, I was at a trading post on a new planet I’d discovered, trying to convince an alien to help me with co-ordinates I had been given to locate somebody else deeper in the galaxy. But they wouldn’t talk to me because I didn’t have enough standing with their faction. Which was rather annoying. The game suggested I fly up to the space station in the solar system to take on a few missions to increase my standing and come back when I had enough clout.

I started trudging towards my ship when sirens sounded. Two ships appeared in the sky, raking the outpost’s metal panels with plasma fire. I ran to my ship, took off, and defended the facility against the two raiders in a dogfight that went from trading shots in tight canyons on the planet’s surface to circling each other in the upper atmosphere. Eventually, I shot them both down, landed back at the station…and my standing had increased to the point that the alien was now more than willing to talk to me about those co-ordinated. In that moment it was like all the promises that games such as Elite had been making had come true after all these years. Not just a pretty 3D interface pasted over a spreadsheet (hello, Eve Online!), but a living world where the pirates don’t just attack you, and where you’re feel to help or not depending on how you feel.

“They got a message from the Action Man”

Computer games! They can be quite good sometimes!


  1. I think Americans don’t really understand how massive Frankie was in the UK during 1985. Probably not helped by the band’s total collapse in the wake of their second album, I guess. ↩︎

  2. According to this Eurogamer retrospective, Denton Designs did talk to Morley, so my feeling may not be entirely crazy. ↩︎

  3. I never did become a Real Person, sadly, but I came close. Around 95% and the full BANG maxed-out stats. Also, I know the murder is telegraphed in the manual, but like every other child in the UK during that time, I had an extensive collection of C90 tapes. ↩︎

  4. Sadly, the C64 version is probably the definitive version, as Denton used the extra memory for back gardens and a couple of additional mini-games. It’s a shame that FGTH imploded so quickly - a 128K Speccy remix version that included those extra bits and some AY versions of Relax / Two Tribes would have made the Spectrum version stand out far above the breadbin, and besides, a remix would fit in so well with ZTT’s attitude of ‘let’s just release a remix every other week, lads!' ↩︎

LENINGRAD CAKE FACTORY

Yes, so it turns out that watching most of Traumazone in one sitting is not a good idea. You’ll reach 11pm on a Friday night basically ready for bed and full of despair. I know how to kick off a weekend, that’s for sure.

Also, the LENINGRAD CAKE FACTORY will haunt your dreams.

LENINGRAD CAKE FACTORY

I am in two minds as to whether to update But This Was A Fantasy? to include the new series. It is 420 minutes of footage after all, and would give me a good excuse to fix a few awkward bits in the UI and maybe move from FAISS to a different vector database in the backend. But I feel I’d also have to edit out a few bits of the documentary. There’s hardcore amateur porn, photos of beheaded people and video footage of mutilated bodies. None of which you want to have popping up on a random vector search. Of course, if I do move to a different backend, I could run a classifier over the footage and give people a ‘safe search’ option by default. Which would have its own problems, but might be something to try.

Anyway, next week, we’ll begin the Autumn Archival Drama Period in earnest. It’s time to go full Potter.

Look! I have made iron!

This week I made two mistakes:

  • I resolved to organize my chocolate molds
  • I bought No Man’s Sky on Switch

Two results:

  • “Do I really have 4 copies of that mold? And am I glad I am not running a count…”
  • “Oh, it’s 1am? I should probably go to bed”

On the bright side, my re-organization of the molds reveals that I still have plenty of room in Mold Box #9 before I need to buy more storage!

(As of writing this post, I still don’t exactly know why the website I normally order my pastry/chocolate things from has sent me a 4lb package that doesn’t seem to line up with any order I’ve made with them for over a year. Maybe I’ve graduated to their secret elite tier where they just send me things that they think are fun?)

Oh, you're British. Maths.

A mini-SHUX-trip roundup!

  • Vancouver remains incredibly pretty in the Autumn, with red and orange trees lining the streets, the sea down at the port, and the forests visible in the distance. And the weather was so nice!
  • The centre is so damn walkable. Unlike any of the other1 visits to cities I’ve made in the last couple of years - no Lyft/Uber trips required, and a pleasant mix of your usual (and Canadian) chains plus local shops. Just really lovely sitting out in a pedestrianized area on a sunny Autumn morning eating an almond croissant next to a city bike stand. Plus, knowing that getting to and from the airport is just nipping around the corner from the hotel and getting on a regularly-scheduled train takes away so much stress.
  • Yes, I was indeed the whitest and tallest person in Jollibee.
  • And now to the actual convention itself! I think we did fewer panels this year, but the two game design ones we went to were both really good, with one being the view from big names, and the other from a more indie perspective, which made them both feel quite different but complementary.
  • Though the common theme in both panels was “learn InDesign’s data merge facility”, which makes me think there’s probably a bit of a gap in the market for something like the equivalent of Clip Studio Paint, but for boardgames. Or knocking something up in Python…
  • The complete insanity of “Quinns’ Courtroom” panel, which went off the rails from the first few minutes, included an amazing indictment of Tom on the subject of dinosaur-based drafting games, an actual lawyer on stage, Quinns forgetting everybody’s name, and Pip channelling Phoenix Wright with some wonderfully impassioned speeches. Which sometimes even worked!
  • I thought the team also got through the awkward questions on the Late Night panel pretty well…though I think they probably regretted all the call-and-response systems they set up as we would not stop doing them. I think we missed this panel last time around, so it was great to see everybody in tired loopiness.
  • One again, we met up with mippy and liquidindian! The precious ginger cake is now safe and sound in a biscuit tin in the kitchen…until I devour it over the next few days. And it was good fun to play Irish Gauge with them, as well as a round of Quacks of Quedlinburg!
  • I did feel a little disconnected from the main SHUX event this year. Not entirely sure why. Maybe because we missed the opening ceremony, skipped the signing bit, and had to dash off first thing on Sunday morning. And Tammy sadly didn’t get to reprise her astonishing betrayal in Blood on the Clocktower due to us not getting there early enough for signing up to the sessions. I don’t think we missed out on anything, though - we had good reasons to skip what we did, and I don’t think it would have changed that feeling if, say, we’d got something signed.
  • Wrong city, but I had Stars in my head all weekend.
  • It seems like Cadbury Canada sells Mini Eggs all year round, which would make it the promised land, except for…
  • Canada’s weird attitude towards Diet Coke. At almost every restaurant, when we asked for Diet Coke, they only had Coke Zero, or they just silently gave us Coke Zero. This is heresy.
  • Somehow, despite donating four boardgames to the SHUX library, I still came home with two more? Plus, I had a good enough time with Fantastic Factories that I might want a copy of my own at some point…and there’s an expansion…ooooh.
  • After all that positivity, wow, Canadian airports, man. Somehow we managed to have such a bad time yesterday. When we got to Vancouver on Sunday morning, we ended up scouring not just the gate, but the general post-security area in order to try and find something to eat. With very limited success. At Toronto, we had to run a gauntlet of security checks, seemingly walking the length of the terminal twice, and being taken aback at the rudeness of employees towards one woman that was concerned that she’d miss her flight, only to be told that “you still have 20 minutes until the door closes” when she was in the middle of a slow-moving customs line, and from experience afterwards, still had a five minute walk at least to get to her gate. As for us, we got to the gate, starving, only to be confronted by gate area having one sit-down restaurant, and us with 20 minutes until boarding was supposed to occur. We remained starving (I did manage to find a terrible sandwich, but it was basically the only real food I had yesterday).
  • We remain terrible at taking pictures.
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  1. Technically, I probably could have done this in New York… ↩︎

Obviously The Fan Is Broken

I earned some impressive Dad Points this week. Dad Points are, of course, the ability to know what’s up with something mechanical, physical, or electrical despite it not being the Dad’s specialist subject. Not only was I complimented by a mechanic on my make-shift attempt to fix a broken cruise-control button in my car, but I also successfully diagnosed exactly why my fridge hasn’t been working right for the past week and a half. Admittedly, the gap between diagnosing it and actually fixing it is why my overall Dad Points count remains low, and I still can’t measure anything for toffee. But baby steps, I guess. And I might have a working fridge by the end of next week…

As we come to the end of September, I’ve had a glance over all the things I wanted to get done this year and just laughed. Almost none of it is going to happen. My hope is that I can at least get the comic stories drawn and lettered by the end of the year. I have been dragging my feet a lot on this, but I should have something in progress during October. Maybe a Christmas release!

(I do have some ideas for a few short Stable Diffusion-generated comics that I hope to get done this year too. These will be a separate release as I don’t want to mix AI and human art…but also I have lots of plans and we’ll see how many come about, shall we?)

Next week, we’re off to Canada for SHUX! So no entry next week as I won’t be taking the laptop. You might get something about the Autumnal delights of Vancouver on Monday if you’re good, mind you…

No Comment

Due to a number of things that I Probably Should Not Be Talking About1, it has not been a good week. I can probably talk about the mild food poisoning I may have got on Saturday eating lunch before I realized that the fridge was 15ºC higher than it should be, but perhaps unsurprisingly, I’d rather not.

In happier news, though, we are getting solar panels! Not a huge amount, but enough to cover the back roof and apparently generate enough power for half our current energy needs. Which is nice. There’s a bunch of permits that they need to apply for, but work will likely start in November, which I guess means I’ll be catching those infamously sun-filled months of Winter as the panels go on-line. Mind you, it’s certainly gone a lot better than my quest for a new car, that’s for sure.

Next week! Something different! (actually, no, probably not, though hopefully a working fridge…)


  1. This is a separate category from Good Things That I Am Not Yet Talking About. Keep up! ↩︎

Curtains, by The Tindersticks

Having now watched all of Better Call Saul, I can now say, with feeling, “well, it’s not as good as The Beiderbecke Affair is it?” Plus: “ooooh, black and white! Isn’t it cinematic?

I will try to write about The Organization at some point, but it’s amusing to me how much more I enjoyed a 50-year-old show with low stakes than the current “this is the greatest achievement that television has ever seen.”

(and it’s not just that - I’d even rate the completely episodic and self-contained editions of Lovejoy as a more enjoyable experience than seeing the usual ‘drugs!’ melodrama play out over five seasons of tedium…but I realize I might be an outlier here…)

Relatively sure nothing else happened this week…1


  1. I am a little mystified at the Twitter demands that the Queen was responsible for Biafra and the Mau Mau massacres. We don’t say that she was responsible for the Iraq War, do we? So why does she have to carry the sins of the Churchill and Wilson governments but not Blair? Even as a fervent anti-monarchist and of Irish Catholic background, it seems a bit much…and, I might add, a bit of a gloss over how, like Iraq, those atrocities were carried out by democratically-elected governments; displacing it onto the monarchy feels like it takes it out of our collective responsibility of a nation somewhat. ↩︎

Rainy Labor Day Weekend

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I remain obsessed by 432 Park Avenue. It is such a terrible building on almost every level, from its appearance of ‘we gave an eight year old a ruler and a pencil and this is what they came up with!’ to the ongoing problems with actually living there (though obviously with a hefty amount of cackling at the fools parted with obscene amounts of money to move in). Impressively, it actually looks worse in person, crammed in amongst a bunch of other, better buildings, not even making it to the curbside of Park Avenue.

100 Eleventh Avenue, though, deserves some praise for just being absolutely hideous on a hilarious scale. Almost as if the architect had a bet on for how many windows could actually be crammed onto a building. And the answer is lots. Trypophobia in skyscraper form, looking out to the river.

Anyway, yes, I did spend some of last week in New York. That’s why there was no entry last Sunday; after all this time, I still haven’t come up with a solution of how to write blog entries and assemble a new version of the blog on the go (well, I know exactly what I have to do — I’m just too lazy to actually move the toolchain off my Mac and into the cloud. I finally walked along The High Line, which somehow I didn’t do when I was regularly travelling to New York for work five years ago for some reason, visited many different Prets, and grumbled about how NYC transport is just about catching up to London of twenty years ago. Although you still have to buy a MetroCard to use AirTrain because JFK airport hates you.

(also, my water ganache whisky chocolates were complimented by the front of house at a Micheline-starred restaurant as “One of the best chocolates I’ve ever tasted.” Which was an unexpected but lovely end to the trip…)

Cleveland down, New York down. Just Vancouver left for the August-September travel madness, and then I need to start planning for the return of the Christmas trip home. The first since 2019! And in the meantime, a Labor Day weekend of DIY and birthday celebrations as the leaves start turning brown and the squirrels bury their acorns under the gaze of this fellow…

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Tiptoe Through The True Bits

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Yes, 43 years old and basically on the stage next to the band. And we got the set list too. We’ve still got it!…even if I can no longer actually count the number of times I’ve seen Los Campesinos in concert. Even when limiting it to US or UK gigs.1

I’ve now been to Cincinnati, Columbus, and Cleveland, so I think I’ve checked off the highlights of “Ohio Cities that begin with C”. Cleveland seems quite nice! Historic downtown core mixed in with some brutalist / modernist towers and plenty of post-90s glass, along with curios like a a turn of the 19th/20th century arcade being retrofitted into a hotel. Pity that there seems to be an interstate between the core and the Great Lake, but maybe next time we’ll make it a bit closer to the shore.

Next week…New York! And then no travel for an entire month before heading to Vancouver again for the welcome return of SHUX!


  1. I will be upset if Sweet Dreams, Sweet Cheeks doesn’t make its way back into a set list in the future. It just doesn’t feel right without “one blink for yes, two blinks for no” somewhere towards the end of the performance. ↩︎

These Macarons Are Not Real

I’m in the private beta for Stable Diffusion. Even with all the large language models of the past few years, there’s something akin to witchcraft when you’re able to type “a photo of macarons” and a Discord bot returns you images like this:

Stable Diffusion-generated macarons

It’s a large step above the VQGAN methods I was using last year and well up there with the output of DALL-E 2 and Imagen. Stable Diffusion has another advantage - soon it’ll be available for free and runnable on really quite low-powered GPU machines. I’m hearing that there’s even going to be a M1/M2 optimized version that will likely generate images in under a minute. When the weights get released in months? Weeks?, it’s Going To Be A Lot. As ever, 2000AD got there first, long ago, back in the Meg, a dark future where IPC sub-editors could dictate our youth without needing pesky writers or robots:

Kenny Who?

It’s interesting that Stable is looking more threatening than GPT-3 has turned out to be so far. I think that’s down to a few factors - where it and its successors fall down is in that longer context - even PaLM, going out of its way to be as helpful as it can (pretending to be sentient if you ask it to, even!), cannot generate a correct and coherent long-form piece. But you don’t need that with an image, because it’s just immediately all there — sure if you look closely at the macarons you’ll see the ganache line can sometimes get a little wonky, but your mind filters over that at a glance, whereas when you get to the first wrong fact in a GPT-X text, it’s pretty much over.

Additionally, the more impressive text models are really quite expensive to train and run, resulting in access to something on the power of GPT-3 being walled off behind OpenAI’s for-pay API. I think that is going to change in the very near future, though. Tim Dettmers’ work is going to bring some of those larger models to your desktop, and Facebook has already released publics weights for the equivalent of the largest GPT-3 language model. We might see a lot more weirdness and exploration in this area in 2023.

Anyway, Christmas cards this year are going to be fun.