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.
The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.
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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.
9:18am on Wednesday, 19th August, 2026:
Anecdote
Stars Reach went into early access yesterday.
I backed this on Kickstarter when it was announced, so have been able to play it (maybe "playtest" would be a better word) for the past few weeks. It's an MMORPG with amazing potential, some of which has already been realised. Its physics is far beyond anything you'll see in any other virtual world. It does have actual gameplay, though, plus building, crafting and gardening. There's a skills cap (which unfortunately I've exceeded by four), so you can't do everything yourself; an economy is therefore waiting to happen, once players have acquired enough money from doing missions that they have some to spare.
Building uses both blocks and panels, which can be freely mixed together. Components are put together from materials extracted from the environment. These have different properties on different planets, so the iron on one planet may be objectively better than that on another. Although plants regrow, minerals don't, so there are two comppeting pressures at work: stay where you are because it has a wide variety of great plants but is mined-out; move to another planet where there's more, possibly different minerals, but the plants might be inferior. The game's message is one of the responsible husbanding of resources. This threads right the way through it; ignoring it is why I have more skills than I'm allowed (although to be fair, it would have helped if I'd known there was a cap before I took them).
Overall, Stars Reach is definitely early-access quality rather than the finished article, but it's still a blast, and there's much, much more to come.
Only after I'd constructed it did I realise that my house looked like a half-submerged TARDIS.
I've since put a blue light on top.
8:35am on Tuesday, 18th August, 2026:
Weird
These Danish chocolate-covered banana mallows aren't really selling themselves to English-speaking monoglots.
I wasn't going to buy them anyway, because I don't like dark chocolate.
8:41am on Monday, 17th August, 2026:
Anecdote
We got this driving toy for our grandson to play with in the back of the car.
The layout is that of an automatic transmission vehicle in the pre-digital age, and it calls petrol "gas" so is from North America. If it were from the UK, it would have an ejector seat button and something for forward-pointing machine guns and rocket launchers.
My main complaint about it is that the steering wheel doesn't line up with the road. You turn the wheel and the road turns, but the starting position is to be turning left. This is not how it's supposed to be, according to the picture on the box. No matter how many times you rotate the wheel, it never lines up properly. I can't dismantle it to fix it, because it's a toy for younsgters and uses special screws that can't be unscrewed
None of this makes any difference to our grandson. It accomplishes it task of staving off in-car boredom for something like five or ten minutes, so we count its purchase as a success.
8:26am on Sunday, 16th August, 2026:
Weird
Seen on a public bench in Colchester:
I didn't know him, and to be honest, I'm quite relieved.
8:45am on Saturday, 15th August, 2026:
Anecdote
Yesterday, I received an emergency message from the government on my phone. So did everyone else who had a phone that was switched on. I actually received two (three hours apart). Some people received three.
I have a couple of points to make about this.
Firstly, telling us that there's a risk of fires and we shouldn't use portable barbecues or fireworks is not an emergency. Pretty well everyone already knew of the fire risks in these drought conditions anyway. When my phone started with the alarm yesterday, I thought there was an actual emergency, maybe a fire bearing down on our house or a missile heading for Colchester. I didn't expect it to be a message reminding terrorists of a simple way to cause havoc.
Secondly, the message itself needs a way to turn the sound off. There were people (my wife included) who closed the pop-up without reading beyond the first line because the alarm was so aggravating. Maybe there is such a way to quieten it. Maybe touching the message anywhere except the "OK" button stops the racket. If so, it's ineffective unless you tell people it exists.
If our new PM, Andy Burnham, thinks that acting on his earlier "tinderbox" comment by sending everyone with a phone a message telling them what they already knew would make the slightest difference either to the preponderance of wildfires or to his reputation as being decisive, he's mistaken. The message just came across as patronising.
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Copyright © 2026 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).