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Thursday, October 12, 2023

Swing Lo....

Lo-fi music is pretty much a thing these days. You can't get on YouTube --or, I presume, a music streaming service-- and not run into people streaming it. It's designed to be low-fidelity with imperfections throughout the music, and no, not in an innovative way such as Thelonious Monk,

The first time I heard Straight, No Chaser, I thought
the pianist was just playing badly, but I soon learned
that there was a method to Monk's madness.

but designed to emulate an AM radio signal to a greater or lesser extent. Okay, that's not being really fair to the sound fidelity, because it does sound much better than an AM transistor radio. It kind of does have a unique, chill type of vibe that grows on you; a person can have it playing in the background while doing other tasks without the music standing up and demanding that you pay attention to it.

Lo-fi music doesn't have to be royalty free --that depends on the composer-- but I've noticed that a lot of it is advertised as such. 

I guess you could say that if Easy Listening Music and Jazz had a kid that also listened to hip-hop, Lo-fi would be the result.

It is very much the 'it' music these days, and lots of people are looking to cash in on the trend with AI generated artwork gracing the YouTube videos of Lo-fi music. Just type in "lofi" in YouTube and you'll see what I mean. Sure, there's artwork that would look at home in a Thomas Kinkade painting, 



and others that give off an anime vibe, 

I teased my questing buddy with this, since
she plays a Bear Druid in WoW Classic.

but there's also plenty out there that veer toward hentai and other, far more sexually suggestive graphics.* 

Sorry, but I'm not going beyond PG on this blog.
Graphically speaking, that is. But if you really
want to hunt around, you certainly can find the
explicit stuff.


Still, I guess it's to nobody's surprise that Blizzard got in on the act:


But what surprised me was what dropped today:



I have so many questions about this.

Wasn't rampant use of the arcane what caused the Queldorei/Sindorei magical addiction when Arthas destroyed the Sunwell? So while I understand why the animators did what they did, it just seemed like an unnecessary waste of the arcane.

Cardwyn: "She could never go incognito anywhere; she's too used to using the arcane for everything." 
Me: Shush; it's just an artist's rendition.
Cardwyn: Don't shush me! Go back to writing! 
Me: Yes, ma'am. 

So... judging by the Water Elemental in the background, Jaina's a Frost Mage? Hasn't somebody told her that Frost is the worst spec in Retail right now? Or that it's pigeonholed into PvP?

And where is she, exactly, wearing clothing that covers her arms entirely, along with a heavy cloak and gloves? It doesn't look that cold outside.

Oh, right, the music. It's good enough, I suppose, but since it's background music it was, well, in the background while I worked. The floating book was occasionally distracting as it caught my eye on more than one occasion while I was working on a spreadsheet.

***

However, I will make a quick rant about a change to YouTube:

From Reddit, because when I actually wanted to
see this pop up, it doesn't, but when I don't,
it's effing everywhere.

At least you can click the X to remove this pop up, but it's still very annoying. I personally am not paying for the privilege of avoiding ads, because Google's algorithm is abjectly terrible at picking out spots to stick ads into a video, and the sound volume differences between the ad and any random YouTube video are different enough that it aggravates my tinnitus. 

There. Told you it was a quick rant.




*In that respect it's a lot like ASMR these days, where you get some people definitely angling their ASMR appearances toward titillation for more clicks. 

EtA: Corrected grammar.

3 comments:

  1. Your confusion about the Jaina image amuses me. She's always been a frost mage? Just attack her in-game NPC in Classic and watch what happens.

    And the outfit simply matches her in-game look. She grew out of the skimpy dresses in BfA when she went back to her home in Kul Tiras. Makes sense too as it's pretty chilly there.

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    1. Also, it took me a bit to get what you even meant by "waste of the arcane"... I guess the floating book? I would've simply thought it's a magic-imbued book instead of her doing anything in specific as I've seen a fair amount of these float around in game by now.

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    2. Oh, that was snark on my part. I kind of figured that she was a Frost Mage given how she looked, and especially since she's a PvP target it would make sense that she would use "the PvP Spec". For some reason, however, until I noted the Water Elemental, it never really crossed my mind.

      And no, I never tagged along any Horde raids on Alliance capital cities (or vice versa), so I never attacked Jaina. Outside of those raids, I don't recall any quests that involved attacking her, although I'll admit that my knowledge of quests pretty much stopped after Mists, and beyond the basic leveling zones in Pandaria I couldn't tell you anything else about that expansion. I pretty much checked out from current quests and whatnot mid-Cata and stuck exclusively to Battlegrounds once I did the main basic leveling quests, and I didn't set foot in an dungeon at all since mid-Cata. (And for the record, I never bothered to do the destruction of Theramore quests. My Alliance toons in Retail can still go see what Theramore used to look like.)

      Yes, I was referencing the floating book with the "waste of the arcane" comment. You don't notice those small things that are clearly either magic imbued or held in place by active use of the arcane nearly as much in the Mage Quarter in Stormwind or other capital cities in Vanilla Classic. It's only in Silvermoon (and The Scryers Tier in Shattrath) where you start to see such obvious use of the arcane in this manner, and Dalaran in Wrath continued the trend. From the standpoint of a city populated by Mages, it makes sense, but from the standpoint of magical addiction, it's also a reminder that use of the arcane is so commonplace that the concept of just reading a book while it sits on the table or even manually pushing a broom around is foreign to Mages (or Sindorei in general).

      I also thought it amusing when I began playing a Blood Elf Mage that from a lore perspective the Queldorei kept trying to tell the Mages in Dalaran to stop using the Arcane so much or you'll attract the attention of the Burning Legion, and here are Queldorei/Sindorei using the arcane for pretty much everything. Basically, they were being a bunch of hypocrites.

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