As we draw near to the last days (Of Blaugust! Put that bug out bag back!) I feel I don't need to hoard my ideas like a cartoon dragon trying to spread all four limbs and a tail across a heap of gold coins. With just five days to go, I think I ought to be able to come up with something for each of them without having to stretch an idea worth a couple of paragraphs into a full post. And with that in mind, it's Grab Bag time. Three or four things that would strain anyone's patience, stretched to fill, but which might slip down easily enough in small bites. Hmm. Not sure that even qualifies as a mixed metaphor. Oh well. On we go. Keep moving, hope no-one notices... Ananta launches on 15 January 2027. The gaming feeds have been busy this week with announcements and reveals from Gamescom 26. I can't fathom these things. I skim the news and maybe one item in twenty vaguely piques my interest. It's a whole lot of information I don't need about games I'll never play. Occasionally, though, a bright, shining sliver of joy bursts free from the grey clump and this time it's an actual release date! Glory be! The game in question, top of my list, pingingest on my radar, most anticipated, wanted, desired and devoutly to be wished for, is, of course, Ananta. I want it so much I can even remember what it's called without having to look it up. Pays to have a short, easy-to-remember title. Ananta, in case you haven't been paying attention, is "the anime GTA". Obviously, that's not what developer Naked Rain or publisher NetEase is calling it but everyone else is. Although not me because I've never played GTA. I'm calling it NTE on steroids. Okay, no I'm not but you get the idea. You can judge for yourself how accurate any of those comparisons might be from the latest promo video. It's a good one. The game has a slightly strange premise. As the central character, known only as Captain, you have to find your missing father and rebuild the failing peace agency you work for and you have to do it by... becoming an internet influencer. I'll hand that off for now. Don't want to thnk about it. More cogently, the game features not one but two huge metropolises, Nova City and Chongxiao, the latter supposedly "a fully explorable sandbox featuring recreational destinations including gyms, restaurants, mahjong parlors, cat and maid cafes, clothing stores, hot springs, and more." I'm guessing both cities are "fully explorable" but maybe Nova City is where the plot happens and Chonxiao is more of a simulation? Speculate away because in just four months all will be revealed. That's perfect timing for me. Who does anything in January? Plus I'll be retired then. I can play all day! I Wish I'd Spent More Time Playing Video Games I've often fancied having that on my tombstone. Or as my Famous Last Words. Which brings me to a somewhat embarrassing confession. I'm about to out myself as a gamer who doesn't actually play any games. Okay, that's a slight exaggeration but only a very slight one. I had cause to look at my GeForce Now account page for the first time yesterday and I happened to notice there's a section where you can see your "Playtime History". Out of curiosity, I took a glance at it. Then I did one of those cartoon double-takes. Then I really took a look at it. Oh boy. I'm not and never have been one of those gamers who keeps meticulous track of how much they play, which game and for how long. I don't keep spreadsheets or run any of those apps that track your gaming time for you. I don't care, frankly. Why would I? Since I started playing most of my games through Steam, of course, I've had some of that information to hand, since Steam records it whether you want it or not. I sometimes sort my library by "Hours Played". I also often glance at the timer at the end of a session to see how long it took, something I also do occasionally, but less frequently, on GeForce Now because there it requires an extra button-press. That's for specifics and it can be quite interesting. For a more general idea of how much I've been playing in any given week or month, though, I've never felt the need to refer to any kind of statistical record. I've always, instinctively and without trying, been able to say roughly how many hours I've spent gaming over any given period. Or so I thought. Apparently not any more. In the last month or so, I've pretty much only played games on GeForce Now, so what's recorded there is almost a full tally of my hours played. I did play one session of Stars Reach directly on Steam before Playable Worlds added it to GFN, so that was about another hour and I think maybe I logged into EverQuest II once, for no more than half an hour at most. Excluding that possible extra 90 minutes, my entire total time spent playing video games between August 8 and August 27 - just under three weeks - comes to six hours and forty-one minutes. Add it in and you get a grand total of just over eight hours at most. That means I've played, on average, less than thirty minutes a day for most of this month. Many of the sessions are less than half an hour and there are multiple days when I didn't log in at all. If you'd asked me, I'd have said I was playing at least twice that. Maybe more like three times. I wouldn't have been lying. I'd just have been very wrong. In the measured period, I've played just one session that lasted over an hour. That was on August 21, when the new update landed in Neverness To Everness. Outside the time-frame, I also played a couple sessions of similar length in Wuthering Waves, which I know because I mentioned it in a post on August 9, when I wrote that the content I'd just completed " took me several hours to finish". Adding that in, I'd estimate I've probably played maybe as much as sixteen hours in the calendar month, which still comes to not much more than half an hour a day. I mean, I knew I wasn't playing as much as I used to but I hadn't realised I'd turned into a half-hour-a-day gamer! Something will have to be done! Where Does The Time Go? That brings up the inevitable question of what have I been spending my time doing? It's an easy one to answer. I estimate that, during August, I've spent at least three hours every day writing a blog post and at least an hour, probably more like two, reading and commenting on other people's posts. Blaugust probably accounts for five hours of every day. Every day. Are we in Lessons Learned week yet? Because if so, the lesson I've learned is that that's too much. I've also spent at least two hours every evening making songs on Suno. There will be a post about that but out of politeness to some delicate sensibilities, I'm saving it for after Blaugust ends. Beryl accounts for about two to three hours a day, walking and playing. Computer problems, legal and financial stuff and household chores probably take up another two or three. That's already about a dozen hours a day. Add in meals and sleep and general, unspecified stuff and it's amazing I've been able to fit any gaming in at all! And that's on the five days a week I don't have to go to work. The end of Blaugust, wetter, colder weather, less daylight, the conclusion of the wrapping up of my mother's estate and my full retirement should all lead to much more time being available for gaming in the autumn and winter. Maybe I can even get up to the couple of hours a day I thought it already was! I swear, I played literally five times as much when I had a full-time job. Time is so weird. Walks Like A Duck I mentioned computer problems in the last section. I'm pleased to say I have now resolved at least one of those. With ChatGPT's help, I managed to find and recover the missing product key to activate the new installation of Windows so I don't have to look at that irritating ghostly reminder message any more. It was a strange conclusion to the whole affair. I bought an enclosure for the suspect M2 drive and ChatGPT talked me through several means of interrogating it to try and figure out if the errant key was lurking somewhere in the data. As we were trying various things, I just happened to notice a document file titled "Windows Key". After all the endless searching through registries and running commands it turned out the damn thing was sitting there in a named file in the root directory. I didn't put it there. I can only assume it was already there when I got the machine because it was dated two weeks before I bought it! You might well think the person I spoke to at the helpdesk of the company that supplied the PC might have known that. It would have saved me one hell of a lot of time and effort. Instead, they gave me two random keys that didn't work and then washed their hands of it. Doesn't inspire a lot of confidence. In the end, I can't even say I needed ChatGPT's help, incredibly thorough, detailed and accurate though it was. I could just have bought the enclosure, found the drive was readable, seen the file, opened it, tried the key and it would have worked. Nevertheless, I did find working with ChatGPT to be thoroughly satisfactory and indeed enjoyable process. Certainly a superior experience to most I've had, working with humans in similar situations. Not only was the AI patient and calm, it was constantly reassuring and on several occasions objectively empathic. This is not projection. It's self-evident in the logs. Again, I'm most likely going to do a full post about this when Blaugust is out of the way but I'm of the opinion that it doesn't necessarily matter if software is sentient, provided it gives the impression of sentience. I know full well no extant AI has either autonomy or self-awareness but I'm a lot less convinced that's as relevant as we think it is. Consciousness is overrated. Goodbye, Dolly And finally, in honor of the passing of a legend, we'd best have something by Dolly. Everyone knew her, even those who'd never listened to a country song in their lives. And it seems everyone loved her. Not many stars of any stripe can claim such universal affection. Given the length of her career and the extent of her fame, I find it slightly shaming I only know that same half dozen of her hits everyone knows. I can't say I've ever even heard anything else but then I certainly never went looking. Here she is, duetting with Porter Wagoner in the early 'seventies. As they say every day on Radio 4 Extra, it contains attitudes of the time so be warned. They were a professional duo for a decade and the break-up was difficult. When she wanted to quit, she wrote "I Will Always Love You" to "express what I feel and have him understand" and she sang it to him when she went to tell him she wanted out. How about that for a letter of resignation? And she wrote Jolene the same day. Geez. Save something for the rest of us, Dolly!