"'Tis the season"? So the season is four months long now? It's nearly two months to Hallowe'en.
At least they haven't started playing Christmas songs over the PA system yet.
The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.
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8:42am on Thursday, 3rd September, 2026:
Weird
This is one of several such displays I encountered in Sainsbury's yesterday.
"'Tis the season"? So the season is four months long now? It's nearly two months to Hallowe'en.
At least they haven't started playing Christmas songs over the PA system yet.
8:13am on Wednesday, 2nd September, 2026:
Weird
It would be the same these days. Passers-by would video the renting.
8:49am on Tuesday, 1st September, 2026:
Weird
Here are two photographs of part of the water tower that dominates Colchester's skyline:
The top one is the general view; the bottom one is zoomed-in. As you can see, some of the bricks have initials on them.
The story goes that there were arguments between the governing parties of Colchester when the tower was built. The Liberals were for it, the Conservatives against. The Liberals won, but the Conservatives weren't finished in their objections. When the Liberals wanted a ceremony to mark the start of building work, the Conservatives complained about how unnecessarily expensive it would be, and dug in their heels. The Liberals had to raise separate funds just for the ceremony, which took time, but this still didn't please the Conservatives. The Liberals said OK, we'll have an opening ceremony without you, at which point the Conservatives caved in.
Meanwhile, the building work had continued apace. By the time the local politicians had agreed to have a ceremony, commemorating their contibutions with bricks bearing their initials, the building was already quite high. They had to climb up ladders and scaffolding wearing their best suits and top hats in order to lay their bricks. This was nevertheless preferable to chiselling out their initials themselves on lower bricks.
So it is that the initials of the councillors who were involved in the construction of Colchester's water tower are on bricks 20 feet up in the air.
This is all according to the guide who showed us around the tower when we went up it last month. I'm sure he didn't embellish his explanation in the slightest.
8:45am on Monday, 31st August, 2026:
Weird
Seen in our local Co-Op:
I don't think a Mars bar ice cream would last long on a grill, but I'm willing to give it a try.
If it doesn't work, I'll eat the rest raw.
9:15am on Sunday, 30th August, 2026:
Weird
Going through Volume II of Designing Virtual Worlds, I found myself in need of an academic paper that told me how many abandoned villages there are in England. I knew it was somewhere around 3,000, but didn't have a reliable source.
I typed the following into Google, trusting its AI to do the legwork:
"I want an academic quality research paper that states how many abandoned settlements there are in England. It's fine if they're restricted to a particular era or county."
It certainly delivered. It produced a .pdf with exactly the information in it that I needed. It was perfect, except for one problem: the AI had written it itself, on the fly.
Next time I want to find an academic paper in a field that isn't my own, I shall be adding the words "peer-reviewed" to my prompt.
8:31am on Saturday, 29th August, 2026:
Weird
This is on the front page of this week's Essex County Standard:
Much as the grieving family has my sympathies, I was somewhat distracted by the grammar.
Still, it all goes to show that AI hasn't yet reached the offices of our local weekly newspaper.
7:54am on Friday, 28th August, 2026:
Anecdote
After President Trump renamed Lake Ontario to "Lake America", I think we should rename the English Channel to "the English Channel". That would stop those Frenchies from calling it La Manche.
9:28am on Thursday, 27th August, 2026:
Weird
Although Volume I of the Second Edition of my book Designing Virtual Worlds is available, the First Edition continues to to be published.
Now, you might wonder why it's published when within two weeks of my releasing a free .pdf of the content in 2021 (with the publisher's permission), a hundred thousand people downloaded a copy. More continue to do so: there were 16,088 downloads from my web site alone last month, although those could all be by web-scraping bots as far as I know, of course. Nevertheless, it raises the question: why would anyone pay for the book, other than liking to have a nice, bound, hard copy?
Well, the answer is that one of the people who downloaded the .pdf ran it through a translation program and sells the resulting Chinese version for £54.19 on Amazon. If you don't read English but do read Chinese, that's why you'd buy it.
I don't know if anyone has actually bought it. If they haven't, I guess that gets the author (one "(MEI)Richard A. Bartle BIAN ZHU") off the hook for violating the CC BY-NC-ND Creative Commons Licence 4.0 that prohibits its use for commercial purposes.
I don't have proof that it was AI-translated, by the way. However, given that the description of its content is "From the creation and design of the virtual world. players and life. ethics and aesthetics-oriented. virtual" this does look to be the most likely means of creation.
I was tempted to buy a copy myself to look at, but didn't. The name of the publisher, Red Flag Publishing House, was something of a red flag.
8:20am on Wednesday, 26th August, 2026:
Weird
Seeds in UK garden centres are often sold with a code on the packet so the prices can be raised without having to remark every packet.
This sounds a good idea if you're a seed-seller, except:
How much are the B seeds second from the right?
9:06am on Tuesday, 25th August, 2026:
Anecdote
The second edition of Designing Virtual Worlds turned out to be much larger than I was expecting it to be. I had to split it into two volumes, the first of which was completed last year and published at the beginning of this one.
After Volume I came out, I immediately set to work on Volume II, spending an average of 3 or 4 hours a day on it. Last week, I finished it, only to find that it was so big that it in turn had to be broken in two. The full book will therefore be three volumes. I'm going to need a larger shelf.
Merely having finished the first draft doesn't mean I'm done with it, of course. I'm now reading through it, catching more typographical errors than I thought I was capable of producing, and making sentences parse more easily. Once I've done that, I'll send it to the editor, who'll send it to the copy editor, who will make hundreds and hundreds of minor changes that I'll have to approve of or reject on a case-by-case basis. I'll also have to produce a bibliography, which should be easy except that MS Word doesn't put citations in footnotes into the automatic bibliography it generates, so I have to go through all those and temporarily place them where they'll be picked up. Once the proofs come back, I have a very short time to create an index (I think this is a ploy to limit the size of the index), then off it goes to publication.
When it's published, I can look through it at my leisure and be horrified to see all the typographical errors that the sub-editor and I missed, and all the changes I accepted that I shouldn't have accepted. My favourite among the latter is where on page 444, what should say "well being immersed ", actually says "well-being immersed".
I'll do Volume II first, then move on to the new Volume III. The hardest task for this will be finding some public-domain pre-AI cover art to use that looks suitably mystical.
I don't know how well Volume I is selling, but I received some royalties for it yesterday so it's looking good. The editor hasn't politely told me that Volumes II and III are no longer required, anyway.
8:17am on Monday, 24th August, 2026:
Anecdote
Here's a composite image of the development of the cover I created for my novel Dheghōm.
Top-left shows the raw image generated by Midjourney.
Mid-left shows the image after I edited it to remove a weirdness on the lower eyelid on the right.
Bottom-left shows the image resized and cropped to a book-cover aspect ratio.
Top-right shows the image after I edited it so that the irises were circular and the tint was more golden. This is the one on the actual book.
Mid-right shows the image after I sent it off to a company to turn it into a paint-by-numbers set, then painted it by numbers (badly).
Bottom-right shows the image after I put it through a smart-blur filter and added a yellow cast to it.
Many people complain about the use of AI for creating images.
Which, if any, of these six images are acceptable to people who don't find the use of AI images acceptable?
8:32am on Sunday, 23rd August, 2026:
Anecdote
When we got our bed nine years ago, it was short of casters. While we awaited some from the manufacturers, which took a couple of months, there was one missing on my side of the bed in the middle. This caused a slight dip that had the effect of very slightly angling me towards the edge of the bed.
The dip went when we received the new casters, but we had a mattress that used memory foam. It kept its form, and continued with the slight angling. As a result, over the years, it gradually moved my sleeping position towards the edge of the bed, until eventually it reached it. Then, all pretence that I was sleeping in a slowly-moving hollow disappeared, and I was sleeping while teetering on the edge of a cliff.
For my birthday in January, my elder daughter bought me a pair of Victorian books about Yorkshire characters (most of whom turned out to be vile, but it claimed to be fact rather than fiction). Having finished the books, I put them underneath the mattress at my side to level it out some.
Surprisingly, it worked. The slight pull of gravity to the edge was replaced by a slight pull towards the centre. Give it another four or five years, and I'll be able to remove the books, making the bed be as it should be. My wife is currently talking about getting a new bed, but she takes so long to make decisions about household furniture that it could well be in the next decade when she suddenly announces we're going to the bed shop.
This book-levelling trick would, of course, be unavailable to princesses, bothered by anything the size of a pea or greater as they are.
8:16am on Saturday, 22nd August, 2026:
Weird
Oh dear, Essex County Standard. Oh dear, oh dear.
I don't expect every member of the general population to keep up with recent leading news stories, but I do expect even local newspapers to have some awareness of them.
7:40am on Friday, 21st August, 2026:
Outburst
People who manufacture paint-by-numbers sets would make it a lot easier for their customers if they printed the numbers in the colour of the matching paint. This would stop them from showing through, which otherwise always happens for pale colours. Whatever colour the canvas is can be left blank.
This is such a simple solution that I can't imagine it's not already being done by some enterprising paint-by-numbers company. Some have probably been doing it for fifty years. It is not, however, being done by the company that printed the paint-by-numbers picture I'm currently doing, even though they put some thin blues on the canvas to indicate shading.
I might be happier if my picture actually had some blues in it.
8:37am on Thursday, 20th August, 2026:
Weird
Our local Co-op sells milk in three sizes: 1 pint (568ml), 2 pints (1136ml) and 4 pints (2273ml).
1 pint costs £1.
2 pints cost £1.49
4 pints cost £1.95
As a rough estimate, then P pints of milk costs £(1+0.5*log2(P)).
If you want 3 pints, it's cheaper to buy 4. I don't know what the economics behind this is.
Looking into the farmers' costs, a typical UK dairy farm produces maybe 5,500 pints of milk a day, which if this formula appplied would bring in a mere £7.21. Fortunately, the formula doesn't apply: the actual amount farmers receive per pint fluctuates, but is about £0.20; they therefore receive around £1,100 for 5,500 pints. A supermarket selling 5,500 pints at £2 for 4 pints would take in £2,750, but there's transportation costs and the like so that doesn't mean they're making £1,650 more than the farmers. They do profit rather more for single pints, though.
I surreptitiously took these photos as evidence of the Co-op's pricing. That, not my poor camera skills, explains why they look so bad.
My poor camera skills would have made them look bad anyway, of course.
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Copyright © 2026 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).