I don't know why they would, but it happens too often to be a coincidence.
The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.
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8:31am on Friday, 6th November, 2026:
Weird
Sometimes, I wonder if antique shops deliberately put unnerving objects in their windows.
I don't know why they would, but it happens too often to be a coincidence.
8:34am on Thursday, 5th November, 2026:
Weird
I took this photograph in Poznan last year.
It wasn't until I saw the feet that I realised the statues were of headless people and not of extracted teeth.
8:57am on Wednesday, 4th November, 2026:
Anecdote
One of the problems I've had with doing my family tree concerns an ancestor called Edward Cooke.
He's my father's maternal grandfather, and he was something of a reprobate. He was imprisoned four times for neglecting his wife and children, having earlier appeared in court charged with the same offence (and drunkenness) but getting away with basically a fine. He makes regular appearances in the Gloucester newspapers as a result of these activities.
I hit a wall trying to find who his own parents were. I knew from his wedding certificate that his father was called John; the problem was that there were two candidates, both born in the right place (Cirencester) at the right date (1836), seven weeks apart, who both claimed at the time of their marriage that their father was called John.
The slightly older Edward Cooke is from a respectable family: John Cooke and Caroline Haviland. Caroline is descended from Thomas de Haviland of Guernsey, whose line was Norman nobility; he served with distinction at the recovery of Mont-Orgueil Castle in Jersey in 1471. Because of this, I can get as far back as Thomas in an unbroken line, 1130 with breaks and ultimately all the way to 1066 — if that's my Edward Cooke.
The slightly younger Edward Cooke is the child of an unmarried mother, Ann Cooke.
The Edward Cooke who wasn't my relative went on to live a completly unblemished life. He had three children, gave his age in the 1861 census (the only one in which he appears as an adult) as 25, and didn't end up in the workhouse.
The Edward Cooke who was my relative had eight or perhaps nine children (three of whom didn't make their first birthday), recorded his age in the census successively as 23, 32 and 46, and his final term in prison was precipitated by his going on the run for failure to pay the workhouse fees for his wife and family.
Deciding which of the candidate Edward Cookes was my ancestor proved problematical. The prison records were almost a help, in that they gave the age of Edward Cooke when he was gaoled, but unfortunately the two candidates were born so close together that their ages were the same at the times my Edward Cooke was imprisoned and released. Likewise, although the date of the 1861 Census fell between the two men's birthdays, the fact that one of them was a habitual liar means I can't trust what he said.
I was stuck at this point for many years, but a recent scan of the Gloucester Chronicle came to my aid. It turns out that my Edward wasn't the only Cooke who had a problem with the law. One Henry Cooke was arrested for beating up one Mary Ann Cooke in 1874. Mary Ann Cooke, née Manning, was Edward's wife.
It seems clear, then, that Henry was a relative of Edward's. The unmarried mother, Ann Cooke, only had one other child (a daughter she called Ann); the respectable family, John and Caroline, had a son called Henry who was two years younger than Edward.
I can therefore suppose with a degree of confidence that my Edward Cooke was the elder of the two candidates, and so was descended from a Norman baron. There's always the possibility that coincidence could interfere (the Henry Cooke who assaulted Mary Ann might have been no relation to Edward, for example), but the new evidence ftends to favour the elder Edward as being my Edward.
Although having a criminal ancestor is not something to celebrate, I have to admit that sometimes it does help with genealogy more than somewhat.
8:22am on Tuesday, 3rd November, 2026:
Anecdote
Well that's the first time I've been unable to remove the fuel cap on my car by hand. It was so stiff that I had to go home and use a wrench on it.
Now I have to decide whether it was a one-off or I need to keep a wrench in the vehicle.
I also have to remember that I still need to buy petrol.
8:58am on Monday, 2nd November, 2026:
Weird
The Doors of Durin, also known as the Elven Door, the West Door, the West Gate and the Hollin Gate, were forged during the Second Age by the dwarven smith Narvi, with writing on them courtesy of the elven lord Celebrimbor. They were the western entrance to the dwarven city of Khazad-dûm, or Moria to the elves.
The north door of St Edward's Church in Stow-on-the-Wold is flanked by two yew trees three centuries old. Without any concrete evidence beyond the fact that J. R. R. Tolkien lived in nearby Oxford and occasionally visited Stow-on-the-Wold, it is claimed that these doors were the inspiration for the Doors of Durin. They do bear some resemblance to his drawing of the Doors, so you can see why people made the association.
Here's a photo of them I took when we visited Stow-on-the-Wold last month:
It's at a poor angle because there were queues of people waiting to have their picture taken standing in front of the door, and I had little time between them for a clear shot.
They do look good, anyway, regardless of any connection with Tolkien.
9:03am on Sunday, 1st November, 2026:
Weird
In Burford church, there's this list of the town's vicars since 1200:
They can maybe fit another one it, b ut after that they're going to have to remake the whole tablet using a smaller typeface. Those vicars in the 1200s just didn't think this through.
8:24am on Saturday, 31st October, 2026:
Weird
I've seen longer user manuals.
Some of them have been in a large enough typeface to be read with the naked eye, too.
8:26am on Friday, 30th October, 2026:
Weird
Last year around this time I was in Poznan, Poland.
We went to a museum on one of the days and saw a suit of armour that was worn by the famous Polish Winged Hussars.
Judging by this photograph I took of the main street in the city, sometimes they still ride down it between the trees.
8:08am on Thursday, 29th October, 2026:
Weird
Here's a scene from the Jurassic Journey area of Birdland Park and Gardens in the Cotswolds:
That tyrannasaurus rex is about to take on those stegosauruses, including a cute baby one. Tyrannasaurus rexes were amazingly good hunters.
You can tell just how amazingly good hunter tyrannasaurus rexes were, because stegosauruses died out about 150 million years ago and tyrannasaurus rexes didn't appear until 70 million years ago at the earliest. Time is clearly no obstacle between a tyrannasaurus rex and its prey.
Of course, given that we're closer in time to tyrannasaurus rexes than tyrannasaurus rexes were to stegasauruses, that puts us in danger too.
10:31am on Wednesday, 28th October, 2026:
Anecdote
When Embers Adrift went down for a few days after suffering some technical issues in the cloud, I figured I could try out a new MMO. Aion 2 (or maybe AION 2 — I really ought to pay more attention during lore dumps) had just come out, so I gave that a shot.
I've now worked up two characters to the top level (45) and have another three around level 20. I decided to stop at 45 because that's when the monetisation starts to kick in, and by all accounts it's quite egregious. There's still some story left to complete, but it involves doing dungeons and raids, which I really can't be bothered with; learning yet another set of boss dances I'd have no need for a month later didn't appeal. I suppose it might if I were interested in designing boss fights, but I'm not; I shall instead wait until someone else has played a couple of dozen different MMOs into the elder game and writes a book about boss-fight design.
Aion 2 is a fairly simple MMO. It looks gorgeous, but it's meant to be playable from a phone as well as from a PC. This means that combat is mainly mashing two buttons (three if you're a spiritmaster, i.e. a summoner), and movement to the next quest point involves selecting a move-to-next-quest-point button then waiting while your character gets there. Combat gameplay is a move, fight, dialogue loop; crafting is grind materials, assess risk, go for it loop.
There are two factions in the world, separated until the elder game when they come together for consensual PvP. They're the Asmodians (Horde) and Elyos (Alliance). I took one character from each faction up to level 45, as they have different worlds and different stories.
The worlds are indeed different, although the instances you encounter are the same. Elysea is pastoral and pretty; Asmodae is rugged and rough. There are some areas that go against the main theme, but most don't.
The stories are very strongly aligned. A leader who is driven to complete a quest (that if they succeeded would strip the game of all conflict, so that's not going to happen) does some questionable things but you hang out with them anyway. They pass through the same story beats, just with different settings and different characters. There's a big bad to defeat, who is duly defeated, then the main quest object is obtained. However, to succeed in their goal, they have to get another one of these quest objects ("cores") in a part of the world that hasn't been released yet.
The story is very, very linear. There are some side quests that appear as a group at certain levels, but mainly you're doing the same old tired things:
"prove yourself"
"collect my lost bags"
"clear a path"
"collect these objectss"
"examine these objects"
"speak to this character"
"click through this dialogue"
Most of these involve combat on the way to doing the banal thing you need to do.
When the whole fate of the world depends on your collecting leather from specific beasts to ingratiate yourself with someone you're going to dump as soon as they've helped you, you know you're deep in lack-of-imagination-land
There are plot holes, too. You can't enter the poisoned lake until we go through a long process of acquiring the necessary protection magic. Oh, would that be the poisoned lake I just spent twenty minutes swimming in, killing creatures that live in the lake so I can cook them?
What is it with games from the Far East and flying whales?
There are major imbalances between the classes. My chanter (melee DPS and support character) and ranger (ranged physical damage) can cut through swathes of mobs like a strimmer, but my sorcerer (ranged magical damage) takes half as long again and my cleric (heals) takes twice as long.
Crafting is annoying. You level up your gathering skills far, far earlier than your crafting skills. This means you keep collecting high-quality ingredients you can't yet use. In the end, you wind up collecting this stuff called odyle that you can transform into other stuff. That's if the bots don't have the particular node you go for on their route.
There's a whole lot more that opens up when you reach level 45, with multiple lines of progression that get increasingly grindy. I didn't pursue them; I have better things upon which to waste my time and spend my money.
Overall, then, if you want to potter around having easy fights following a strict do-this-to-do-that plot line, it's a nice, inoffensive game until the level cap. After that, I don't know because I stopped playing at that point.
It was quite fun levelling up, but sadly there's one thing that means I won't be taking any more characters up to the level cap: gliding. OK, so this is a game in which you get the ability to fly very early on. You can't keep in the air for very long, but it's very useful; my characters regularly use it, at least once a minute when out of combat. There's also gliding, which involves jumping from a height, pressing the space bar, and pointing where you want to go. It's basically flying, and it uses the same timer; if it gives you more time airborne, I didn't notice. So far, so good.
Unfortunately, you can't fly in dungeons and gliding works differently. This is the problem one for me. There are three party-based dungeons that you have to enter to progress the story, and two of these have gliding. Gliding really does not work the same as it does outside. I don't know how it does work, but on both my characters in both the dungeons I never got past the gliding segment. I always fell short of where I was supposed to land. The other party members went on and completed the dungeons without me. I was given a "spectator" title as a reward (although thankfully, the storyline still progressed).
I'm not the only person who has problems with gliding, either, as there are many complaints in forums and Reddit from people who can't get it to behave. The correct method (hit space then do nothing until you land) didn't work for me. Even if I'd wanted to carry on playing, this would have been a show-stopper for me. It's mandatory for the fourth story dungeon, the level-45 Draupnir, so that's where I stopped.
Anyway, it was a pleasantly spent 90 hours of play. I'll invest my next few evenings trying out some of the longer BAFTA-nomination games on my list (I've tried 48 so far, but there are 140 in total).
Here's a screenshot from Aion 2 in which one of the major Asmodian NPCs admires my character's outstanding qualities.
8:07am on Tuesday, 27th October, 2026:
Miscellaneous
Here's how the recipe for clear mock turtle soup begins, from my grandmother's 1936 edition of Mrs Beeton's Every-Day Cookery:
I haven't read the full book, so don't know if elsewhere it gives instructions on how to divide a calf's head into quarters.
8:41am on Monday, 26th October, 2026:
Weird
I came across this sign in Burford when we were in the Cotswolds:
On the one hand, you probably can be proud of a district that isn't afraid to refer to gabion baskets, implying as it does that the local population is so well-educated that most residents know what these are.
On the other hand, you might want to temper this when delivered by a sign with random capitalisation and no punctuation, ending in a noun-phrase slogan as if it were a sentence and terminating unnecessarily with a preposition.
The gabion baskets lined a stream, by the way, and you pretty well had to stand on top of them before you could actually see them.
8:23am on Sunday, 25th October, 2026:
Anecdote
You don't see many fire alarms like this any more.
There were some at our primary school. Small boys found them irresistable.
That may be why you don't see many fire alarms like this any more.
8:58am on Saturday, 24th October, 2026:
Weird
Seen in the window of the Victorian Christmas shop we encountered last week:
Those Victorians loved their Moomintrolls and Harry Potter merchandise.
8:38am on Friday, 23rd October, 2026:
Weird
I didn't see anyone damaging it, but you can't argue with notices.
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Copyright © 2026 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).
