The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.
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11:15am on Monday, 19th May, 2025:
Weird
I don't know what escaped from this house, but I hope it's been recaptured.
9:10am on Sunday, 18th May, 2025:
Anecdote
Well, the UK did badly in the Eurovision Song Contest (or "ESC" as the hosts kept calling it) as usual. We managed a respectable 88 from the juries and 0 from the public. If it were all on the public, we'd have come joint last with the hosts, Switzerland (and the winner, Austria, would have been fourth behind Israel, Estonia and Sweden).
Austria seems to have won because they had a counter-tenor who could only sing about six notes, but did so exceptionally well. The staging was also good, although it was more like a video than a person on a stage.
One of the questions I ask after Eurovision is whether, if the singer had been representing the UK, they would have done as well as they did. Of the top ten, I don't think Austria, Estonia, Sweden, Italy, Greece or Albania would have even been in the top half of the results table; only Israel, France and Switzerland would have been (and maybe not even Israel, given that most of their votes came from the viewers).
Our entry had a catchy chorus, unobtrusive staging and likeable, presentable, experienced singers who could sing very well. It wasn't too similar to any other entry except perhaps Latvia (because of the close harmonies). Sure, the song's composition might have been too complicated for a Eurovision audience, but was it worth zero? There were other countries with mish-mash songs that nevertheless managed to scrape together a few marks — Norway and Poland, for example. We might have suffered because our song was immediately followed by the eventual winner; then again, the eventual winner may have benefitted from immediately following our song.
It's easy to find explanations for why the UK does badly, but which don't seem to apply to other countries. Many of the singers couldn't actually sing very well (such as Estonia, Lithuania, Italy, Ukraine) and there seemed to be a surfeit of overweight women wearing armoured bodysuits and thigh-high boots (Denmark, Malta, Finland, Spain). If we'd put forward any of those entries, we'd have lost not only the public vote but the jury vote, too.
I actually liked the two entries that came bottom (San Marino and Iceland), so understand that I am somewhat out of line with the views of industry professionals and the European voting public.
Oh well, perhaps next year we'll enter the same group and give them a song that will appeal to the audience as well as to the jury, and scrape our way into the top half of the results table.
I thought two of the presenters, Hazel Brugger and Sandra Studer, were pretty good, by the way. The third, Michelle Hunziker, was free of all personality. Petra Mede from Sweden is still my favourite though!
8:51am on Saturday, 17th May, 2025:
Weird
Someone, sometime in the past, must have thought: "You know what the child of today wants? An alarmed-looking doll".
10:55am on Friday, 16th May, 2025:
Comment
After 57 hours of play, last night I finished playing Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. I can see why it's been getting rave reviews.
The story is strange and very touching in places. The writing was excellent. What I particularly liked about it was that it treated the player as an intelligent person: the underlying fiction was something that you put together yourself as the game proceeded, not something that was laid out in full and explained patiently. A good deal of the game's power came from this. I felt that some aspects were being held back needlessly from a character's point of view, but I can see why they did it for the good of the overall plot. At one point, I thought that the game was setting itself up for a sequel but it immediately continued into what I thought would be in the sequel. There's still an obvious possibility of a sequel, and I'll definitely play it if it comes out. There are two endings, but as a creator of worlds it was no contest as to which one I would pick.
The mechanics for the different characters (of whom there are six in total) are interesting and individual. Creating builds by giving characters appropriate weapons and pictos/luminas was quite fun. The synergies were almost as good as those in The Secret World. In the end, I'd set up Maelle as a death machine and Sciel was only killable when caught in a stun lock.
Combat is turn-based but Souls-like: defensively, you have to learn the enemy attack patterns and try to time your parries against them. I have a problem with this kind of system, because I've got very fast reactions and have to train myself not to parry the moment I see the animation incoming. I don't like at all; it feels as if I'm having to slow down my thinking. Some of the later mobs had simple attacks, but did five of them in a row: if you missed one, you had to waste a character's move to heal everyone up; if you missed two, you had to waste a turn resurrecting everyone; if you missed three (or sometimes, even two) it was a wipe. I was not good against these mobs.
The game's music is refreshingly different and completely matches the overall vibe; indeed, to some extent it defines it. I bought five tracks from the album, but after listening to snatches of the other 155 it was fairly clear to me that most were variations on the same theme.
The acting in the cut scenes was pretty damned good. The eye saccades were especially nice. Sometimes, though, the clothing changed from what the character was wearing before and after the cut scene. That was weird, it was as if the cut scene were a movie rather than an animation.
When I started up the game for the first time, it told me I should be using a controller. That would have been useful to know before I bought it, although to be fair I wouldn't then have bought it and so would have missed out on an enjoyable experience. Some of the keys had to be pressed twice to work initially, although later on this seemed to correct itself.
Now for some gripes.
Non-boss mobs respawn when you rest in camp. This means you can kill them over and over and over to get XP. This felt a bit like cheating to me.
The writing for the interactions with regular NPCs and for side quests wasn't anywhere near as strong as for the main story. Some of the comic relief characters were not funny.
As soon as I heard Maelle speak, I thought she sounded like Shadowheart out of Baldur's Gate 3. This transpired to be understandable as they have the same voice actress, Jennifer English, and while some voice actors have a wide range, either English doesn't or she does but was instructed not to use it.
It was awhile before I realised that speaking to party members in camp was not the same as using the campfire to speak to them. As a consequence, relationships between party members were on zero for much longer than they should have been (although catching up was quick once I got to it).
Early in the game, you come across objects that you can't use except in camp, but you can't set up camp. Rather than watching us try all manner of ways to set up a camp, simply telling us that we'll be able to do so later would have been helpful.
The game has multiple locations that you traverse between at continent-level. The camera at continent-level is third-person from a high viewpoint, but with the individual locations it's second-person over the right shoulder of the leading character. However, a handful of locations have a weird combination with a fixed camera and you move the party using absolute directions rather than relative to where they're pointing. I don't know if these are unfinished zones or bugs; I suppose I could look them up to find out, but either way it was somewhat jarring.
There are no mini-maps for the locations, which means it's easy to get lost or to miss parts of them. There is a map for the continent, but staggeringly it can't be panned. You can zoom in and out, but not move it around. This makes it unnecessarily hard to find locations you've previously visited, because if you zoom out far enough that the area shows up, it's too far for its name to appear so you don't know which one is which. Making this map moveable would be the single best improvement for this game in my opinion. It's no use having good mechanics if the interface stops you from getting to them in an easy manner.
The side quests aren't tracked. I don't mind going old-school and writing them down, along with where I should return them and to whom, but I do mind not being warned in advance that I'd have to do this. Sometimes, it wasn't even clear if something was actually a side quest or not (in one case, involving Monoco, it wasn't). It was also possible that you could hand in a quest too late but not be told that this was the case, so you thought it was still on when it was off.
Jumps and climbs are arbitrary. Sometimes, you can climb up a ledge; other times, you can't climb up a much lower ledge. Sometimes you can jump on top of objects; other times, you can't. For jumps that require a run-up, it's hard to line up where the character is going before you set them off, which in combination with the roll-on-landing that often happens means you can land where you want but will then roll off it. This is exceptionally annoying when the jump puzzle has more than 50 jumps and one mistake puts you back to the start.
Overall, though, this is a very atmospheric and interesting game that actually has something to say. Maybe it's because it was developed by an indie French company (it is very French); it's certainly an improvement on cookie-cutter AAA titles made by developers who won't experiment because they don't want to lose money.
PS: The last French game I played that was localised into English also seemed to have this problem:
7:53am on Thursday, 15th May, 2025:
Anecdote
Wow, on Windows 11 you really don't want to press left alt/left shift/print screen by accident while not knowing exactly what you did. It took me half an hour to figure out I'd switched on high contrast mode and I needed to use the same combination of keys to get out of it.
Black backgrounds, yellow window borders ... it wasn't pleasant.
7:29am on Wednesday, 14th May, 2025:
Weird
8:23am on Tuesday, 13th May, 2025:
Anecdote
When I was dropping off the exam scripts at the university yesterday, I spotted this bird:
I didn't know what it was, so asked my friendly local AI. It identified it as an Egyptian Goose, and this seems to be supported by evidence from Internet sites I actually trust. Egyptian geese aren't native to the UK, but there are some out in the wild. This must be one of them.
It can't have been at the university for long, because it hasn't been captured by students and eaten.
8:46am on Monday, 12th May, 2025:
Weird
So far, retirement hasn't looked a lot different to working. I spent last week going through the proofs of an upcoming textbook, making "only essential changes" (there were around 400 of them) then over the weekend I marked my CE817 and CE317 exams for free because I didn't want to dump them on any (former) colleagues.
When I picked up the scripts on Thursday, the administrator said I was a hero. I already knew I was, though, because of this definition on a poster in one of the university lifts:
It's terminology-dilution in action.
9:15am on Sunday, 11th May, 2025:
Anecdote
I saw this pile of games in an antique centre last weekend:
My dad, brother and I used to play board games a lot when I was growing up. We had those sets of Totopoly, (travel) Go, Spy Ring, Go for Broke and Cluedo. I still have some in the attic (I'm not sure which, as after we grew up my brother and I shared them out).
It's still sobering to see games I played dozens of times wrapped up with string in an antiques centre.
I would have bought them there and then, but my wife was with me so sadly this wasn't possible.
12:17pm on Saturday, 10th May, 2025:
Weird
From this week's Essex County Standard:
Fate plates do sound more interesting than fake plates, but these were fake plates.
It's no surprise that the car was a BMW.
The article immediately above this one in the newspaper, on page 14, is entitled "Leading the 'AI revolution'". It begins: "Colchester and wider Essex look set to be at the heart of the AI revolution after key organisations united at Essex University for a special summit."
Opposite it, on page 15, is another article entitled "Leading the 'AI revolution'". It begins: "Colchester and wider Essex look set to be at the heart of the AI revolution after key organisations united at Essex University for a special summit." The two articles are identical, except that the one on page 15 is missing a paragraph but has a photo accompanying it.
Elsewhere in the newspaper, five headlines start with the word "Man" and describe his various adventures. Thrillingly, three start with the word "Woman"; it's not always men who get into trouble these days.
It's always good to be reassured that the Essex County Standard really does reflect the standard of Essex County.
8:17am on Friday, 9th May, 2025:
Anecdote
It's examination season at Essex University. Although I've been retired a whole week, I offered to mark the exams I set so that other people didn't have to mark my papers by basically rolling dice.
There aren't as many out-takes from exams as there are from assignments, but here are a handful from last year. The first three came from a question in which I asked candidates to discuss five aspects of a game set in the present day that would need to be localised for players time-travelled to the today from a year of the candidate's choosing between 1800 and 1980.
If the game is set in 1955, any cars will have to be reskinned to horses and carriages to adjust to the pre-car Britain.
In 1900 people used shillings and pennies but today we use pounds.
The words people used in the 1980s don't exist anymore.
Birds define physics by flying with their wings.
Eve was given an apple by a sneak.
Some sound they can pronouns but some can't.
7:25am on Thursday, 8th May, 2025:
Anecdote
One of the first things I did on the first day of my retirement was to buy a new pair of shoes.
I usually only have one pair of shoes on the go at any time, and they tend to last me for years. My wife buys maybe six to ten pairs for every pair I do. The reason I felt a need to buy a new pair was because of a gash in my old pair.
I think I did it when moving a three-piece suite out to the front of the house, ready for the council to take it away and shred (for £70). A passer-buy asked if he could have the sofa so his kids could play on it, so I said yes; even if I knew in advance that there'd only be two armchairs to take away, it would still have cost me £70.
The gash serves to show two things: firstly, people who don't wear shoes can expect the occasional visit to the accident and emergency department of the local hospital; secondly, whatever they make shoes out of these days, it's not as gash-resistant as leather.
I've only shown you part of the shoe, so it's harder to notice that I don't shine them as often as I perhaps should.
7:25am on Wednesday, 7th May, 2025:
Weird
It's papal conclave time again. I'm hoping the cardinals don't elect Peter the Roman, because Saint Malachy's Propecy of the Popes suggests we might have a cataclysm if they do. Then again, we might have one anyway, the way the world is heading.
Pope Francis didn't appear in the prophecy, which is at its final stage now. I think Saint Malachy must have skipped over him, on the grounds that when he was made Pope his predecessor, Benedict XVI, was still alive. This is just the sort of behaviour that a twelfth-century Irish archbishop might have regarded as being not the done thing.
We'll probably get a Pope Francis II.
8:58am on Tuesday, 6th May, 2025:
Weird
I took this photograph on my last day at the university, as I was heading back to my car to drive home.
If you want to subvert large language models, train them on the outpourings of students.
8:44am on Monday, 5th May, 2025:
Anecdote
These were among the materials I threw away when I cleared out my office at the university.
Sadly, they were too big to use for 25mm figurines and too small to use for 175cm people.
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Copyright © 2025 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).