The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.
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8:21am on Monday, 5th January, 2026:
Comment
9:01am on Sunday, 4th January, 2026:
Weird
This post box in our village was put on a telegraph pole, but a few decades later the pole wasn't needed any more as they put the cables underground. They had to keep the bottom of the pole because it now had a post box attached to it.
So few people send letters these days that I expect they'll take the post box away some time in the next few years. Then, we'll be left with a telegraph pole stump and the People of the Future will be thinking "whuh?".
9:22am on Saturday, 3rd January, 2026:
Anecdote
I got some Love Hearts in a bag of retro sweets for Christmas.
They're always changing the words it says on Love Hearts, to keep them contemporary, but some seem to endure. The packet I had included one reading "YOU'RE FAB", which there used to be in the 1960s (to the amusement of my dad, whose initials were FAB). Anyway, whenever I get a new packet, I tip out all the sweets and read them.
Then, I make sentences out of them. I made this one this time round:
They don't scan well, but they read: "YOU CAN SUGAR LIPS TOO MUCH".
I suppose I could have licked them to make the letters stand out, then photograph them rather than scan them. Instead, though, I ate them.
Pro tip: if you want to feel an uneasy bubbling in your stomach, eat an entire packet of Love Hearts in under ten minutes.
8:55am on Friday, 2nd January, 2026:
Anecdote
I've been playing Path of Exile of late. Path of Exile 2 came out recently and didn't cause a sensation, so I thought I'd check out the original.
Yes, well.
The first thing to note is that you don't design a character, you just choose one of the half-dozen or so archetypes available. The second thing to note is that most of your time is spent alone in instances; only at the hubs will you see other players, although the chat window is usually buzzing with people talking about elder-game stuff. POE is meant to be an MMORPG, but it's perilously close to being a non-MM ORPG.
The game uses an isometric viewpoint with point-and-click movement and combat. This means that if you're fighting something, you have to be facing it. That's not very easy to do for one-on-one combat, but most of the time you're facing hordes of please-kill-me mobs running at you in AOE-friendly clumps. Occasionally, though, there are mini-boss mobs in those clumps, and some of these are harder to dispose of than any number of regular mobs. In part, that's because you might not be able to line them up with your attack very well, but mainly it's because of the resistances system.
Ah, resistances. Damage is classified as being of a particular kind (physical, electrical, fire, cold, poison, whatever), and if your target is resistant to your primary damage type then you're in for a long fight. If you're not resistant to your target's primary damage type, you're in for a short, losing fight. You can lower your target's resistance with a spell, but that means you need to target them, which (as I said) is difficult for a single opponent, especially when it's surrounded by a bunch of other mobs so it's hard to spot. You can increase your own resistance with a potion, but that's rather contingent on knowing what kind of damage is coming your way.
Early on, I noticed that there was no penalty for dying. You could come right back and continue a fight from where you left off, except you're now on full health and your opponent is on whatever lowered health you inflicted on it. I therefore built a glass cannon character: I could one-shot scores of mobs and most mini-bosses; the mini-bosses I couldn't one-shot would one-shot me, but I could return multiple times to finish them off.
I didn't notice for some time that this situation did not prevail for the whole game. At some point, being killed in a fight cost XP — something like 10% of the points needed to go up a level. You never go down a level, so for the major boss fights against (in my case, fire-) resistant mobs I found it best to tackle them after I'd just levelled up. Gawd knows how much XP I lost before I noticed the change in death penalty, though.
The problem was compounded in that I was often unsure as to what had killed me. Sometimes, I'd catch a glimpse of a mini-boss and I'd be dead before I knew anything about it beyond the fact it existed. Other times (and this was very annoying) I'd kill a mob but it would have some kind of death throe that would also kill me if I didn't move out of the way quick enough, which wasn't always possible when there were swarms of trash mobs clumping around me like white blood cells on an infection.
The instance maps are usually huge, with some degree of randomness to them. As with all maps in MMOs, the route from start to finish is rarely simple. Here's an example of a map I happened to screenshot (overlaying the instance I was in):
The game has crafting of a kind. You find items of different quality, and use orbs to change their properties and slots. The slots house gems to upgrade (and to some extent define) what the item can do; these can support each other, so creating an item with the maximum number of slots that hold the colours of gems you want in the linked configuration you want is central to crafting. The effects of orbs are random, though, so customising items can use up hundreds of orbs.
Orbs are the currency that players use when trading among themselves. I didn't trade anything myself, though, because there was no explanation as to how to do it. I think you need to pay money for an extra bag tab that you share with other players or something, I'd have to look it up to be sure, but that sounds as if it would involve effort. POE is not in general very good at explaining any of its mechanics. When I started, for example, I was given a choice of which league to use: standard, keepers or hardcore keepers? I didn't even know what a league was, let alone what the difference between the three types were, and there was nothing to tell me, either. It seemed to recommend keepers, in that this is the one it highlighted, so that's what I went with.
The game seems to have a vibrant community, but it's all at the end. I barely saw any other players at all, and there were no guild invites in the chat box that I noticed. I could have hung around for the elder game, but having played through the main story quest considered that this was punishment enough. The elder game is based around running instances of maps that you've found, and you only get six attempts per map. I was usually one-shotted six times from different mobs when I tried it, although I did manage to complete some. If I'd done enough, I might have got a nice, unique-object reward that I could actually use. The story continues as an epilogue if you manage to get up to maps of a certain higher level, but I wasn't so desperate to find it out that Iwas willing to grind my way through to it.
There's another aspect to the elder game that's to do with managing NPCs to reconstruct a city. This is a completely different kind of game to the levelling one, but the players seem to be OK with it. I made a faint start to it, but only as a test to see what it involved; I didn't pursue it in any kind of depth.
There were other forms of content that were more combat-oriented, which felt as if they had once been the elder game for earlier expansions. There was a menagerie of mobs you'd captured and could kill for rewards (they invariably killed me); a mining system in which you collect ore that can be spent on something or other, I never got enough to find out; a heist system, in which you have to fight through a long and winding instance, pick up a McGuffin, then fight your way back out through five times as many mobs as you met on the way in (I only succeeded once); an artefact-collection system that opens up a lot of content if you succeeded in using the first artefact provided (I didn't); a tree that gives a lot of goodies if you collect stuff, which I did actually manage to do quite often (although I never did find out how to extend the tree's branches). The tree also provided some kind of sentient arms that grow out of your back; I had lots to choose from at the end, but can't say I noticed any difference when I used any of them, I either one-shotted or was one-shotted regardless.
I realise I've been somewhat negative in my comments here, but the game did have plenty of good points. I particularly liked my troop of zombies, which acted to keep mobs at bay while I relentlessly lobbed fireballs at them. Overall, it was quite fun, if somewhat repetitive.
The skill tree was quite nice, too, although in classic POE style the usefulness or otherwise of the options available weren't explained. I made good choices for causing crazy levels of AOE fire damage using wands, but given that 95% of my spell usage was fireball spam I probably would have been better using a staff than dual-wielding wands.
Anyway, after 94 hours I'm done with it and have now uninstalled it.
Next up, I think I'll go back to The Elder Scrolls Online to see how much it's changed since I last played in 2019.
Also, I want to keep my left-hand's fingers on WASD for movement, not 123 for potions.
8:49am on Thursday, 1st January, 2026:
Anecdote
2025 sounded futuristic, but 2026 sounds like an ordinary, run-of-the-mill kind of year.
Normally at this point in the calendar, I look back at what blog posts were the most popular. I did indeed do that this time round. Sadly, though, they're incomplete.
In previous years, my web site's stats package has deleted the monthly stats every quarter. This time, though, it didn't, so safe in the knowledge that I could access the whole year any time I wanted, I didn't record them.
When I checked yesterday, it had changed its mind and deleted all but the stats for October to December. Splendid.
Oh well, here are the posts that had 240 or more hits on my QBlog site for the final quarter of 2025, ranked by the number of hits they received:
1082 I gave a presentation to some VR world developers https://www.youhaventlived.com/qblog/2025/QBlog111125A.html
814 My notes for Sir Gawain and the Green Knight https://www.youhaventlived.com/qblog/2025/QBlog061025A.html
295 My wife telling me I didn't need to wake up https://www.youhaventlived.com/qblog/2025/QBlog031025A.html
294 I had a flu jab https://www.youhaventlived.com/qblog/2025/QBlog091025A.html
290 The BAFTA longlist https://www.youhaventlived.com/qblog/2025/QBlog101225A.html
275 Men in lycra shout at me https://www.youhaventlived.com/qblog/2025/QBlog131025A.html
260 The loss of Terra Nova https://www.youhaventlived.com/qblog/2025/QBlog101025A.html
251 A nine-year-old girl has a sultry voice https://www.youhaventlived.com/qblog/2025/QBlog021125A.html
240 My BAFTA voting thoughts https://www.youhaventlived.com/qblog/2025/QBlog221125A.html
I chose 240 as my cut-off because my stats package only records the top 30 hits of whatever kind (including icons, landing pages and the like), and 240 was the highest number to be bottom of the 30.
In addition to these posts, there were two from the past that consistently bring in a good number of hits. Gawd knows why:
1154 How the look of playing cards has evolved over the past two hundred years https://www.youhaventlived.com/qblog/2013/QBlog050413A.html
832 The Red-Nodes Clown joke https://www.youhaventlived.com/qblog/2010/QBlog030510A.html
So, overall, then, I can improve my hit count by mentioning BAFTA and talking to people with a shallow knowledge of the history of virtual worlds.
I cross-post my QBlog entries on Facebook, so have another metric for measuring success (or, more likely, failure). The top posts by number of shares are:
8 Pope Lego XIV https://www.youhaventlived.com/qblog/2025/QBlog271225A.html
5 A rip-offer is ripped off https://www.youhaventlived.com/qblog/2025/QBlog290125B.html
5 I gave my final lecture wearing my PhD gown https://www.youhaventlived.com/qblog/2025/QBlog300425A.html
3 A student's use of AI https://www.youhaventlived.com/qblog/2025/QBlog300325A.html
3 I published Bhrēwā https://www.youhaventlived.com/qblog/2025/QBlog060825A.html
3 Game Game Game https://www.youhaventlived.com/qblog/2025/QBlog250925A.html
2 Pebble decorations https://www.youhaventlived.com/qblog/2025/QBlog310325A.html
2 Application accepted https://www.youhaventlived.com/qblog/2025/QBlog020425A.html
2 This Lemon Fancy has no icing! https://www.youhaventlived.com/qblog/2025/QBlog040425A.html
2 Volume I of the 2nd edition of Designing Virtual Worlds is out https://www.youhaventlived.com/qblog/2025/QBlog280825A.html
2 Take me to your leader https://www.youhaventlived.com/qblog/2025/QBlog081025A.html
2 Fibreglass goats in Poznan https://www.youhaventlived.com/qblog/2025/QBlog281025A.html
All the rest received 0 or, very occasionally, 1.
As far as Facebook is concerned, it looks as if publishing books, moaning about AI and making visual puns relating to faith leaders are the way to go.
9:33am on Wednesday, 31st December, 2025:
Comment
When I retired, I had visions of going on holiday more than once a year. We have plenty of savings, no work limitations and the whole world to see. More practically, there will come a time when we're too elderly to go on holiday, so we I was hoping to explore while we can.
We didn't go on holiday this year.
I doubt we'll go next year, either. My wife regards holidays as something you take to recover from work, and as we're not at work any more, we don't have to recover from it. If I nag her, we might get the odd few days away in the UK, but what with the grandchild and all, I don't envisage a ten-day trip along the Rhine, or even a long weekend in Copenhagen.
Oh well, at least I can play games on my computer whenever I feel like it!
10:09am on Tuesday, 30th December, 2025:
Weird
On the one hand, it's good to see that the guide dogs collection box in Sainsbury's sees a lot of use.
On the other, it's not good to see that it isn't on any of the store cleaners' routes.
9:10am on Monday, 29th December, 2025:
Weird
As is tradition, the day after Boxing Day our local Co-Op featured this display.
I tried to buy a packet, but the bar code hadn't been entered into the system. I had to buy a packet twice this size instead.
This is also tradition.
8:56am on Sunday, 28th December, 2025:
Weird
On Christmas Eve, we went to Sainsbury's and arrived just as a chap was pushing some shopping trolleys into the bay.
Even on non-busy days, it's often hard to get a small trolley rather than one large enough to carry three sacks of coal, and these were just the right size. I took the first one.
It was brand new. It was the smoothest, most responsive shopping trolley I've ever used. It had never seen rain, frost or people who habitually steer into bricks.
Looking at the handle, I saw it was a hire trolley:
There must be some company that keeps a warehouse full of perfect shopping trolleys all year round, to release them at the one or two times of year when every single supermarket doesn't have enough shopping trolleys.
If ever I find myself in possession of a large warehouse and ten thousand shopping trolleys straight off the production line, that's a business I'd like to get into. They must be able to charge a fortune.
8:24am on Saturday, 27th December, 2025:
Weird
8:33am on Friday, 26th December, 2025:
Weird
Oh well, Christmas is over for another year.
8:29am on Thursday, 25th December, 2025:
Weird
8:37am on Wednesday, 24th December, 2025:
Anecdote
When my wife and I were looking through photos to put on next year's calendar, we came across a good one of our younger daughter and grandson. Unfortunately, it was spoiled by the presence of a woman in the background.
"We could use it if it weren't for that useless woman", I said.
I meant "useless" in the sense of "not helping". Earlier, I'd described a van as being useless. It's my default way of referring to something in a photograph that would improve the photograph by not being there.
"That's me", said my wife, inspecting the useless woman.
We had a good laugh about it, but this was two weeks ago. I fear that the longer she takes to plot her revenge, the worse it will be.
10:02am on Tuesday, 23rd December, 2025:
Weird
This is a cruel way of tricking hungry birds into thinking they've found berries large enough to feed a family of eighteen.
9:22am on Monday, 22nd December, 2025:
Weird
I saw this list propped up in the bread section of Sainsbury's.
It looks as if it's someone's shopping list, but it's all Sainsbury's products and it includes the prices. Could it, therefore, be some kind of stealth marketing campaign?
Nah, Sainsbury's isn't imaginative enough to try that. It's a shopping list.
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Copyright © 2026 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).