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The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.

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5:19pm on Monday, 8th February, 2010:

The Oregon Trail

Anecdote

The 20-year-old Buffalo Bill annuals that I read when I was a kid didn't just contain cartoons, prose and colour plates. No, they also contained games. Here's one I remember called The Oregon Trail.

First, the set-up:

Hmm, I guess I should show the rules at a scale where you can read them:

Not a lot of rules there, but all the promise of a "team game". Let's see what's on the next two pages:

Should you actually want to play this game, you'll want to read the hazards. Here they are closer to life-size:

They really knew how to design games back in the 1950s...

This is a game for children, though, so although yes, right now you read the hazards, grokked the gameplay and felt no need to play it, as a kid you perhaps would have played it if it was to hand and it was raining outside and there were no computers or Internet or daytime TV. You would have worked out for yourself the conditions for which each of the alternatives offered by the hazards was the better one. In fact, my brother and I did just that. For example, the first hazard, on circle 3, you always missed the turn for because yes, you stood a 50/50 chance of getting further next time if you didn't miss a turn, but you stood a one in six chance of rolling another 3 and winding up with the same decision to make and a turn behind.

Because of this, the game was actually fun — but as a puzzle, not as a game. As a game, it sucked: once you'd worked out what the best move always was (which sometimes was dependent on the die roll, but was always determinable) it was just a case of rolling mindlessly like in Snakes and Ladders. I won't pretend it was this game that made me want to design my own games that were better, because it wasn't — there were plenty of sucky games around back then, as indeed there are today. It did, however, mean that when we got to read the book The Oregon Trail in class at school I was slightly more knowledgeable than the other children about it. See? Games can be educational!

Not educational enough to make it play right to left, not left to right, though. For me, north is always at the top of the map...

3:06pm on Sunday, 7th February, 2010:

Mounted and Bladed

Comment

I've been playing Mount & Blade for the past few weeks, and finally won (well, in as much as "won" means anything in an open-ended game). As victory screens go, this has to be one of the more understated ones I've seen for a long time:

It told me every (game) day, so I guessed it must have wanted me to stop at that point.

The game has plenty of flaws, the most frustrating of which is always being last up the siege ladder because even the lowliest of your soldiers will push you off trying to get up first. They all pale into insignificance, though, against the visceral thrill of riding your spirited charger, blade swinging, into a row of archers and knocking every one of them flat. I'll put up with being sent on endless collect-a-cow quests and bickering companion morale failures for something like that.

Oh, normally when I blog about the games I play it's because I have some particular gripe about them (other than unrealised potential, which is just too common to mention). Mount & Blade is no exception. My moan concerns the graphics, which in the first-person view are reminiscent of LotRO's or Oblivion's (the map view is less impressive). All was well until I encountered water, which always looked like some kind of psychedelic experiment rather than water. I finally figured what was going on when I managed to line up the reflections just right:

That's my character's coat of arms. Instead of reflecting the sky in the water, it was reflecting my character's shield as if it were the size of the sky.

Hmm. Probably not supposed to happen, I think...

2:00pm on Sunday, 7th February, 2010:

Wrong Number

Weird

We got our new house insurance documents last week, but only today did my wife actually bother to read them.

Here's what they have as our telephone number:

I guess it shouldn't surprise me that people are still programming this kind of thing in Cobol, but really...

4:53pm on Saturday, 6th February, 2010:

Rubbish Cross

Weird

We went to the tip this afternoon to get rid of the large quantity of expanded polystyrene we'd accumulated in our garage from inserts in the boxes of the electronic goods we've bought over the past few years. The people who work at the tip seem to get great job satisfaction from scavaging, collecting all sorts of things that people don't want but that they may have a use for (or, I guess, figure someone visiting a car boot sale may have a use for).

Nevertheless, I hadn't seen this there before:

The workers saw me take the photo and told us it was to mark the burial site of the last viking who worked there. I think they may have been joking.

I'd have been inclined to believe them if they'd said it was to mark the burial site of the last viking that someone had placed in a skip, though.

10:34am on Friday, 5th February, 2010:

100 Today

Anecdote

Had my mother's father lived, he would have been 100 today. As it was, he died in 1989.

Here's a photo of him at our wedding in 1985:

That's exactly how I remember him, except that the flash on his forehead makes him look like he had less hair than he did (which, thanks to the way that male baldness is passed through the female line, means I know I won't be going bald myself — unlike my paternal grandfather).

He was a wonderful grandad: exactly what, whenever you hear what qualities ideal grandads should have, you think "yes, that's my grandad". He was kind, jolly, and always treated children as equals. We loved him to bits. I still miss him to this day.

He was the fifth of eight children, and, like everyone else in his family for generations, destined to be a farm labourer. He was a good one, too: unlike many of his schoolfriends, he spurned the idea of living in a tied cottage because it meant the farmer could threaten you with eviction; instead, once a year he'd go to York along with the other farm labourers for what amounted to a labour auction. The farmers would choose which workers they wanted and establish what they were willing to pay. It was entirely possible that you could return home with no job, or a low-paid one many miles from home. My grandfather was always chosen first by the farmers in his district. (My grandmother told me that; he was a very modest man himself and never offered such information of his own accord).

He spoke making a distinction between second-person singular and plural. Basically, he used thee, thou, thy, thine. It was years before I noticed this; I just absorbed it like any child does with language. As a result, I can speak that way myself if I want, I don't have to think about it. Unfortunately, as with the French tu, it's only a form you use with your close friends and relatives, so it's not a lot of use to me except it makes me grate when I see it in cod medieval dialogue trying to look authentic.

Despite his simple background and upbringing, he was a clever man. He wasn't educated, but he was clever. You wouldn't have known it except to talk to him; he had the driest sense of humour I've ever encountered. He was extremely knowledgeable about agriculture, not so much because of what he'd been taught as because of what he himself had observed. He would take us for long, long walks through the countryside when we were children, pointing out things like foxes' dens and badgers' setts and telling us how he knew the difference. He was sort of like a Crocodile Dundee except for deepest rural Yorkshire instead of the Australian Outback. One thing he could do, which he was apparently in demand for, was tell the size of a field in acres just by looking at it. I tested him once, too, on a field in my home town, Hornsea, which I knew to be 10 acres: he said it was 10½ acres, and when I corrected him he said no, it was 10½. I went back to my original source a few weeks later and asked him how big the field was and he said it was 10. "Not 10½?" I asked. "Well, if you want it exact, yes, it's 10½". Field-sizing: as super-powers go, it's an unusual one.

He would call me "professor" sometimes, because he thought I was clever. It never occurred to either of us that one day I would ever get to be a bone fide professor; my biggest regret about him is that he didn't live to see it happen. To us, it was out of the question that someone with our status would ever reach so high. There was a window of opportunity, though, through which I managed to climb; these days, the curtains would probably have been drawn on me.

The most ironic thing about this being my grandfather's 100^th is that he himself did not know for many years when his birthday was. Few people of his background and generation paid much attention to it. They didn't get cards, they didn't get presents, and they only knew it was Christmas because they got an orange and a threepenny bit in a stocking on Christmas Day. When he married my grandmother in 1938, she had to ask his mother when his birthday was, because he only knew it was in February.

I could go on and on, but this is a blog, not a biography. The past may be a different country, but the people there were people just like us.

Oh, I should tell you his name, because that's important: Arthur Toase. Yes, that surname is pronounced as in fingers-and-toes. From such teasable beginnings come strength of character.

Damn, but I miss him.

5:04pm on Thursday, 4th February, 2010:

Planning Works

Outburst

The work to Square 2 at the university is still stalled, but at least now we have an explanation:

If only they'd known there was going to be bad weather, they could have planned for it. You can't blame them for not expecting a bit of unpleasantness IN THE MIDDLE OF WINTER.

Oh well, February is the month with the lowest average rainfall so hopefully they'll catch up (although I suspect the fact that it's shorter than all the other months may account for some of that).

6:06pm on Wednesday, 3rd February, 2010:

Changing Tastes

Anecdote

As a brief alternative to my occasional series on famous women whom everyone but me thinks are beautiful, I thought I'd look back at women whom I used to think were beautiful when I was a lot younger to see if I still do. I don't mean "still do" in the sense of whether they've kept their looks (this isn't an objectification post); rather, I mean whether I think today that what they looked like when I thought they were beautiful is beautiful.

Er, well I know what I mean anyway.

So, I racked my brains and produced some faces that impressed my teenage eyes. I know, you may not have heard of many of them, but this isn't your blog...

The first one I thought of was Susan Penhaligon:

Hmm, yes, I think I can say that I agree with my teenage self there.

OK, how about Elizabeth Sladen?

Yes, I thought I was on fairly safe ground with that one.

Hmm, maybe Angela Douglas? I remember that my friends were surprised I liked her:

Nope, my friends were wrong.

To cut a long story short, I engaged in this exercise for as many subjects as sprang to mind — Judy Geeson, Sally Thomsett, Nerys Hughes, Rhapsody Angel, Nancy Kwan, Susannah York, Susan George, Cherry Gillespie, Deborah Harry, Alexandra Bastedo, Shakira Baksh plus many others — and gradually realised that I wasn't finding any discrepencies. Women whom I thought beautiful when I was in my teens are still, in my opinion, beautiful (well, based on what they looked like back then; obviously some of them don't look so good now, for example Sharon Tate).

I guess this means either that my opinion hasn't changed over 35 years, or the ones I used to think were beautful but don't now didn't answer the call to come to mind...

5:43pm on Tuesday, 2nd February, 2010:

Completion

Miscellaneous

I have a decision to make following the demise of Metaplace, which I've been putting off: do I spend several days drawing the 100x100 squares map of a fictional Wild West that I spent several weeks researching on and off, or don't I bother? I don't need it any more, but it could be fun, and I might have a use for it a few years down the line.

Oh well, maybe if I find the kitchen table free one weekend and I don't have to drive to Newmarket...

4:27pm on Monday, 1st February, 2010:

Leaving Presents

Anecdote

It was Dick Williams' leaving do at the university today, but I didn't attend.

This isn't because I don't like Dick, because I do — I've know him for years. He did his MSc when I was first starting out as a lecturer and I taught him on my Prolog course (in his words, "back in the days when I had hair"). The reason I didn't attend was not because of whose leaving do it was; rather, it's that I never attend any such get-togethers at the university, no matter whose they are. I never sign any cards nor contribute to leaving presents, either.

I used to, back when I was a lecturer in the 1980s, before I left to make a fortune in industry (which, to be fair, I did — just not for me). I would go to all these leaving events, sign all the cards and contribute towards all the leaving presents. Even though most people only contributed 50p, I used to contribute £1 (which was like £2 in today's money). I remember one occasion when a secretary (they were called secretaries back then) came round collecting for the present of another secretary who was leaving to have a baby after having only worked in the department for six months. She got £1 from me, too.

The reason I vividly remember contributing to this particular secretary's leaving present was that this was my own last day at the university. I didn't get a leaving do, nor a leaving present, nor even a card. I got a P45 from the accounts office, but that was it. I felt a bit let down, to be honest.

As a result, when I returned to work at the university 15 years later, I vowed not to attend any leaving do, nor sign any leaving card, not contribute to any leaving present, no matter whose it was. The late Bob Monkhouse used to say something like, "I always go to other people's funerals, because if I don't go to theirs, they won't come to mine". Well, I went to their funerals and they didn't come to mine, so now I don't go to theirs either.

What? Me? Bitter?

5:09pm on Sunday, 31st January, 2010:

Ancient Codes

Anecdote

I think maybe I'll throw away this ancient scroll of arcane spells that I have on my desk:

The one with DB25/DB9 serial connection signal codes can probably go, too. It's always annoyed me that the DB9 should have been DE9, so it has it coming to it...

I'll keep the one with the decimal/hex conversion chart and ASCII table on it, though, that sometimes comes in handy.

5:08pm on Saturday, 30th January, 2010:

Where I Work #14

Anecdote

Continuing the occasional series...

The bottom of the cabinet to my left looks like this:

Well, it does when I don't open it. That's the bin I usually use (one of two bins in my office); its contents are mainly bits and pieces that I can't recycle or that are scraps of paper I can't be bothered to walk to the garage with where we keep our recycling pile. At the top there, for example, is the wrapping of a bar of huckleberry-filled chocolate that I didn't recycle because it got huckleberry fondant on it that I licked off. Yeah, used tissues and other assorted ghastliness goes in there, too. It usually gets emptied once a week.

Anyway, behind the bin is the cupboard, and this is what's inside it:

The box to the left and the black box on top of it contain materials to do with a game, Sopera, that I co-wrote with Bridgette Patrovsky and Andy Bain. It's a game system that can be adapted to multiple genres and has a collectible card game mechanic (but not one that breaks any patents) and works as a casual storytelling RPG. It's very flexible; I use it in my game design course as an assignment. It has such huge potential that Bridgette, Andy and I set up a company to hold its IP.

The paperwork for this company, Sopera Ltd., is kept in the pile on the right of the shelf. The red box at the top has a bunch of pictures in it cut out of Dragon in the late 1990s, which I was going to use as place-holder art for a Fantasy version of Sopera that I never wrote. Last time I looked in it was maybe 10 years ago when my elder daughter wanted some Fantasy pictures for a project she was doing at school.

The middle box, betweem the two Sopera-related piles, is where I keep my US Letter sized paper. It has some card stock in there, too, and some film-industry standard brads for when I print off movie scripts. Underneath it are some design documents from consultancies that I've done (the companies folded before I could return them; given their content, this is not always entirely surprising). The bottom one, in the blue folder, is all that's left of the game Hotel Blue Heights that I worked on 10 years ago at Wireplay, which falls into the same category.

Phew, that's the end of that cupboard at last. Next time, I can start on the third and final shelf unit to my left, which is even more uninteresting than this one...

4:08pm on Friday, 29th January, 2010:

Insurance Insurance

Anecdote

We got our yearly bill for the house insurance earlier this week from the Halifax. It came to just over £500.

It's a character of the English that they are very tolerant and accommodating, and they will allow you to push them quite a long way without much more than a grumble. However, if you push them one iota too far then they react with immediate, vicious, violent, controlled anger. This facet was exhibited by my wife, for whom "WHAT?! £500 A YEAR?!" was an example of such a trigger point. She spent most of this afternoon checking how much the alternatives were (answer: all of them were less than £500 a year for the same or better coverage — including from the Halifax itself). Enraged that she was being taken for granted and ripped off, she chose an offer from Churchill that came in at just under £200 and went with that.

Then, she phoned the Halifax to tell them what jerks they were. She could have called them before and got the "we can reduce the amount you pay because you've been a good customer" line, but no: if they could reduce it, they should have done so beforehand. Consequently, she called them only after having already bought the replacement insurance just so she could listen to them make the offer then twist the knife in their squirming, "this call may be recorded for training purposes" body.

Never, ever push the English too far...

Referenced by Wrong Number.

4:46pm on Thursday, 28th January, 2010:

Dirty Fingers

Weird

I arrived at work today to find a bunch of students waiting to get into their lab, the door of which was locked. Fortunately, my key works for that lab so I let them in.

The lab next to my office does not have a key, though. Instead, it has a keypad:

As the students pointed out, it's not especially difficult to discover the code, given that 2, 5, 6 and 0 are in grey and the rest of the numbers are in white. They promptly demonstrated by opening it.

Note to keypad manufacturers: label your keys in grey, not white...

6:46pm on Wednesday, 27th January, 2010:

Face Recognition

Anecdote

It was visit day today, and they had the robot out again.

This robot is supposed to show off the department. It has a webcam on the top, a pair of eyes that are I think supposed to express emotion, a voice to talk to you and a screen to show it's doing. It's also mobile, but fortunately today its wheels had been switched off, presumably because the organisers finally realised that it gets in the way when it wanders around.

The screen includes facial recognition software, so it knows when it has someone to talk to and can gauge their response. I got there early today, so had a chance to try it out:

That's a £5 note.

Next time The Queen shows up, the robot will remember her, recall that she didn't find its banter amusing, and consequently tell her off.

9:39am on Tuesday, 26th January, 2010:

Weather Symbols

Outburst

Last week, GMTV replaced its old weather graphics with new ones.

I don't like them.

I didn't like the old ones much either, but these are worse. The clouds in the symbol for rain, for example, look like a pile of coal:

The graphics don't make meteorological sense, either. This is the one for cloudy spells:

OK, so the sun is behind the clouds, fair enough. How come the clouds have shadows on them, then? Shouldn't the entire cloud be in shadow?

This is the graphic for the sun itself:

Note how the nice use of a spectral point on the surface gives you the impression that the sun is a sphere rather than a disc. OK, so it is basically a sphere, but what light is shining on it to give it the reflection?

Here's the summary chart:

It's still giving the weather for the Republic of Ireland while managing to omit France from the picture entirely. Channel Islanders don't get to find out their weather, either.

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Copyright © 2010 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).