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The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.

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7:41am on Tuesday, 19th March, 2024:

Missing Word

Anecdote

I was approached recently to participate in a TV documentary, for which I was sent a release form.

I've received plenty of these before and usually they're no problem, but this one was asking way, way too much. For example, it required me to "freely consent to participating in activities in connection with the Program that may be hazardous and dangerous" and to authorise others to "photograph, film, videotape, record, reproduce, distribute, use, portray and/or otherwise exploit my appearance, name, likeness, views, performance, characters, poses, persona, biography, photograph, signature, social media handles, recorded image, voice or other sound or visual effects produced by me" and to "irrevocably and unconditionally waive the exercise of any moral rights" (which is meaningless under UK law as some of those rights can't be waived — that's what makes them rights).

I was further asked to agree "to follow Producer's related policies and protocols" without being given copies of said policies and protocols, and had to confirm that I was "not under any obligation to any third party which would in any way prohibit or restrict me from participating in the Program or its advertisements, publicity or promotion", which I couldn't do because I have an employment agreement with the University of Essex that requires me to deliver lectures and classes to timetable.

In another outrageous clause, I was asked to "release from liability, never sue, and bring no proceedings of any kind against Producer ... including, without limitation, for any violation of any rights of privacy, publicity, defamation, or any other personal or property right, including without limitation personal injury, property damage and/or other loss suffered by me in connection with or related to the Programme, regardless of whether caused by Producer's negligence or wilful misconduct".

When I queried what the "consideration" was that I was handing over all these rights in return for, I was told it was "the promotional opportunity of appearing in the programme", which might have been OK if they'd guaranteed I'd actually appear in the programme.

I said there was no way I was signing that, and I was told in reply that the broadcaster makes a very wide variety of productions and this was a standard boilerplate contract that worked for them all. They asked what I wanted to change.

Hmm.

Well here's the thing. There's a huge opening paragraph that I couldn't parse. It seemed to me that it was missing the word "of". When I asked how I should read it without that word, I was told that I was correct and it should be there. That would be understandable if this were a one-off contract, but I was given the impression that it had been used countless times before and so must have been read by countless lawyers before, some of whom would be acting on behalf of high-powered celebrities.

None of those lawyers pointed out the missing word? Really?

This is what happens when you give contracts to computer programmers. They find compiler errors in them.



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8:19am on Monday, 18th March, 2024:

Dune Done

Anecdote

We went to see Dune 2 at the Ipswich IMAX yesterday. We were seated in the cinema for over 3 hours.

I didn't know my bladder was still that strong. Judging by the race to the gents afterwards, I wasn't the only one suffering, either.

It was much better in the old days when there was an interval, even id the ice creams they sold were rock solid and the Kia Ora they sold was so dilute that it could have been made by homeopathists.



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8:53am on Sunday, 17th March, 2024:

Crunch

Anecdote

Just as I opened the internal door to the garage yesterday afternoon, I spotted something heading for my mouth. I was speaking at the time and didn't shut my mouth in time. Something got inside and I crunched it.

It was hard, broke into pieces (that were also hard) and tasted horrible. Some of it got stuck between my teeth. I didn't manage to recover any bits that could identify what it was, or even what colour it was. It wasn't very large  — maybe 4mm across at most — and it didn't sting or anything. I still had its flavour in my mouth an hour later and had to buy an overpriced Lindt creme egg from a card shop to get rid of it.

I think it was a spider.



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9:25am on Saturday, 16th March, 2024:

Europe

Anecdote

I bought this stencil when I was in my late teens, to use for making games. It was only of limited use, because it was a fixed size (fairly small) and didn't include country borders. Also, I was hoping they'd bring one out for the eastern Mediterranean but they didn't. In the end, it was more convenient to trace maps from my atlas.



It has East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia on it, so is somewhat out of date now. On the one hand, I ought to put it in the recycle bin because I haven't used it for 45 years and it's a breeze to obtain scalable maps from the Internet now if I need one.

On the other hand, it's a relic of the past.

Hmm, so a bit like me then.



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9:44am on Friday, 15th March, 2024:

1,000,000 Years BC

Anecdote

When I was at school, I used to run a postal games magazine. It was mainly for the games Diplomacy and Railway Rivals, but I would also occasionally publish rules for new games that I or my subscribers had invented. If enough people wanted to try them out, I'd run it.

One such game, designed by Russel and Sean Noonan, was a mass caveman melée brawl. The game was fairly simple and the rules weren't entirely complete. Each player had a number of pick points to spend on attributes (strength, constitution, dexterity, intelligence) and weapons (bow, rock, small rock, club, bearskin, stone dagger). People of intelligence 5 could opt to be a shaman and have juju powers, but with limits on what weaspons they could use. I asked the readers of my zine what they thought, and from the responses changed some rules and added more. The immediate problem everyone saw was that players would try to avoid getting into a fight and it could well end up with two players on opposite sides of the map each holding position waiting for the other to attack. To counter this, the aim of the game was changed: no longer was the last caveman standing declared the victor, but there'd be a cavewoman over whom each caveman was fighting. The cavewoman was dubbed Raquel, spoofing the movie 1,000,000 Years BC, and the game was named after the movie. It was proposed that if we ran a second game, that one would be 999,999 Years BC, although we never did because when I went to university I folded my zine as I didn't have time to write it any more.

Remember, this was 50 years ago. If you don't like the idea that cavemen would be fighting over a cavewoman then you need to go back to the 1970s to complain about it.

One of my own innovations was to give Raquel some sovereignty. Yes, cavemen could overpower her and try to drag her to the edge of the board (to win the game), but she could struggle free. When she did, she would run to the most attractive caveman nearby. How did she decide who was the most attractive? Well, cavemen were given a looks attribute into which players could put some pick points, but overall attractiveness could be increased by issuing shouts. You got one shout to supply with your movies. If Raquel liked what you shouted then your attractiveness would improve. The gamesmaster (that would be me) decided if Raquel liked what she heard.

This is where it gets interesting, and it's why I thought I'd post about it.

Cavemen being cavemen, their vocabulary was limited. They could use each other's names (and Raquel's), but beyond that they were only allowed to use words from a limited list. The more intelligent the character, the more words they were allowed. In addition, I allowed players to invent one new word, once in the game, which would then also be available to every other player.

There were 80 words on the initial list in total, with five levels of intelligence.
1: AAAGH!, bad, fight, friend, good, HAHA!, happy, her, him, hit, hot, kill, me, not, one, go, pretty, run, sad, strong.
2: big, clever, club, knife, little, lose, spear, stone, stupid, take, throw, two, ugly, weak, win.
3: arrow, bow, can, cut, dead, enemy, give, hard, how, hurt, in, make, out, shoot, shout, soft, three, want, why, will.
4: backward, bearskin, down, fire, forward, four, from, juju, maim, red, side, tell, to, up, when.
5: attack, blood, blue, defend, green, head, help, if, right, yellow.

It takes but a quick glance at that list of fairly innocent words to extract sentences with less-than-innocent meanings. The words 'make' and 'out' are right next to each other, for example, so it's easy to work with those. The word 'spear' quickly developed an agreed-upon metaphor among the players, and because 'bearskin' sounds like 'bare skin', that extended its meaning, too. Raquel didn't like anything too crude ("give me head"), which meant players went with double-entendres and innuendo rather than outright smut.

It was a surprisingly-enjoyable game, largely because of the shouts. It's not the kind of thing you could adapt for computers, as it needs a human to judge the value of the shouts. Still, it did teach me a valuable lesson that has served me well in the years since: no matter how much you limit players' vocabulary, if they want to say something then they'll say it.



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1:38pm on Thursday, 14th March, 2024:

Magnolia

Anecdote





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2:42pm on Wednesday, 13th March, 2024:

Stamps

Comment

On the left, a booklet my grandmother gave me for keeping stamps in. On the right, today's stamps.



They must be bigger because they cost so much more than in the old days.



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7:13pm on Tuesday, 12th March, 2024:

Vote

Anecdote

If you're going to put election posters on the walls of toilet cubicles, you have to expect they're going to be defaced.



Still, all publicity is good publicity!



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1:31pm on Monday, 11th March, 2024:

Town Names

Comment

English surnames tend to derive from relationships ("Johnson"), locations ("Welsh"), occupations ("Cooper") and personal characteristics("Short"). The ones based on locations could be related to countries ("Scott"), counties ("Kent"), settlements ("London") or other geographic features ("Hill").

It occurred to me that most of the ones that are from town names tend to be from the north of England and the east Midlands. You hear of people with a surname such as Carlisle, Berwick, York, Durham, Hull, Preston, Bolton, Wakefield, Bradford, Sheffield, Derby, Chester, Warrington, Scarborough, Lancaster, Lincoln, Mansfield, Leicester, Grantham, Burton, Stafford, Crewe, Spalding, Mansfield and plenty of others.

You do get a few from the southwest, but not so many: Bath, Poole, Barnstaple ... I'm drawing a blank after those. Likewise, in East Anglia there's maybe Dereham, Cromer, Wymondham and Hadleigh.

No surnames from the west Midlands spring to mind, and none from the home counties either apart from London, Dover, Maldon and Hastings.

These are traditional surnames; I don't include ones made up by comedians or royalty. They're also the larger towns; I'm sure there will be villages that have associated surnames (Norton Disney, for example). It seems odd that so many are from the north and east of England in comparison to the south and west, though.

I'm sure there's an explanation for it somewhere, but why waste idle speculation on actual fact?



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9:30am on Sunday, 10th March, 2024:

Box Office

Comment

These are the top-grossing films 2003-2022, according to Box Office Mojo:
2022    Top Gun: Maverick
2021    Spider-Man: No Way Home
2020    Bad Boys for Life
2019    Avengers: Endgame
2018    Black Panther
2017    Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi
2016    Finding Dory
2015    Jurassic World
2014    Guardians of the Galaxy
2013    Iron Man 3
2012    The Avengers
2011    Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2
2010    Avatar
2009    Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
2008    The Dark Knight
2007    Spider-Man 3
2006    Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest
2005    Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith
2004    Shrek 2
2003    Finding Nemo

Those are US domestic box office figures by calendar year. Wikipedia's list, which covers worldwide box office and seems to be well-sourced, produces some different results but it counts the years differently so it's difficult to make comparisons (it puts Avatar in 2009, for example).

Whatever, none of the movies 2003-2023 won the Academy Award for Best Picture. None of the directors of these movies won the Academy Award for Best Director. None of the leading actors in these movies won the Academy Award for Best Actor for their role. None of the leading actresses in these movies won the Academy Award for Best Actress for their role.

The people who are complaining that the top-grossing film of 2023, Barbie, ought to be winning the Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Director or Best Actress should not be surprised.



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9:19am on Saturday, 9th March, 2024:

Facebook Ads

Outburst

Oh no! My Facebook ad blocker has stopped working since that outage last week. I'm now seeing all those advertisements that I was previously shielded from. Jeez, it's almost unusable!

That said, one of the ads was for a product I may well purchase as a birthday present for my wife.



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1:54pm on Friday, 8th March, 2024:

Queens

Weird

Midjourney isn't very good at creating playing card images.

Clockwise from top left: hearts, clubs, spades, diamonds.



For clubs, it's downright misleading. Not one of the four images actually features a club.



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2:26pm on Thursday, 7th March, 2024:

Fieldnotes

Anecdote

I was interviewed for a book a couple of weeks ago, Fieldnotes from the Metaverse. Only extracts will be used in the final publication, but the full interview is available here. The questions were more specific than usual, in that the interviewer wanted to delve deep into particular topics, but they were nevertheless not ones I hadn't been asked before.

I'm looking forward to the book when it comes out, because other people have also been interviewed for it who undoubtedly have much more interesting things to say than I do!



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1:26pm on Wednesday, 6th March, 2024:

Campus Cat Day

Weird

It was Campus Cat Day yesterday at the university. There were posters and ads all over, advertising the fact.



The cat's name is apparently Pebbles, although that sounds to me as if it was decided by a committee. Everyone calls it Campus Cat when they want to refer to the bad-natured, unfriendly, feral beast. Quite why we suddenly had a Campus Cat Day when previously we didn't was not made clear. I'd normally have expected the university to publicise some obscure-but-worthy cause instead (yesterday was also Disociative Identity Disorder Day) and for students to publicise some obscure-but-cooler-sounding cause (it was also National Absinthe Day), but no, we got Campus Cat Day.

Today, I found out why.



Apparently, someone thought it a worthwhile investment of university funds to raise a monument to the entitled, aloof, malign animal. The plate reads: "In celebration of CAMPUS CAT aka Pebbles, who brings joy to the lives of thousands of University of Essex students and staff".

Not if they don't wash their hands after petting him, he doesn't.



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6:01pm on Tuesday, 5th March, 2024:

Pasted

Anecdote

I caught a splash of toothpaste on my shirt this morning, right where the buttons are, and I can't get it out. It's resistant to all attempts to remove it. I've already given one lecture with it on prominent display and am about to give another. My students are going to think I'm a slob — which I am, but I don't want them to know that.

I think it's bonded to the fabric.



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