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The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.

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9:56am on Sunday, 16th November, 2025:

Missing K

Weird

This week's Essex County Standard has an article about the local grammar school for boys, headlined "'Outstanding' grade for school's boarders". I didn't even know it had boarders, but apparently it does.

Anyway, this is the sub-headline:

£19 per year seems exceptionally good value! I wondered if it might be some kind of peppercorn arrangement, whereby boarders pay only a token amount and the costs are covered by the school, the council or some trust left by a wealthy benefactor.

I read on, and discovered:

Oh. OK. I should have realised: this is the Essex County Standard, and they'd missed a "K" out of the headline after the "£19".

I wonder if any of the people who write these articles read them afterwards?

Yes, I know my posts are also full of errors, but I don't charge you £1.60 a week to read them.

8:44am on Saturday, 15th November, 2025:

Dune: Awakening

Anecdote

After 213 hours, I finished playing Dune: Awakening yesterday.

It's actually pretty well-designed. It reminded me a lot of another Funcom title, Conan Exiles, in that it has a strong survival-game element to it and a number of similar mechanics. In particular (and perhaps understandably, given the IP involved), it pays more attention to the weather than most modern MMOs do.

It's set in the universe of Frank Herbert's Dune novels, except in this version Jessica had a daughter. I'm not a fan of Dune, but D:A realised the setting very well. The progression was nicely managed, with a number of essentially vehicle-based gameplay shifts (on foot, sandbike, buggy, ornithopter; there was also a wheel, but that looked useless to me so I didn't bother with it).

I finished the main story quest, at least inasmuch as I reached as far as it got: it didn't end, so I assume further expansions will reveal more. I can't say I was enamoured of the storyline, as it messes with the player's sense of identity, but I'll probably check in with it offline when the next installment appears, to see if my suspicions of where it's going are correct.

I maxed out all the classes, although if I'd kept playing I could have gone up more levels and so taken advantage of a few extra points to allocate to my class skills (I was level 181 when I quit; the cap is 200, although I only found that out just now when I checked).

As I mentioned earlier, the weather in the game plays an important part; this is refreshing, given how many MMOs either ignore it or give it only cosmetic or fishing-minigame effects. Stay out in the sun too long and your water consumption rockets, so you always have to have some with you to keep topping it up. Water is a primary resource, obtained mainly from distilling it from the blood obtained from the many corpses you cause, but you can get it from plants at the right time of day and from collector units plonked atop your base. You can drink blood directly, instead of water, which I tended to do because if you're wading through bodies then there's a lot of it and you can easily fill your blood pouches. I wasn't pleased with this vampirism aspect, but at least you don't suck it out of characters when they're alive, and you use a machine rather than fangs.

Spice plays a big part too, but only in the latter stages. You need it to make most end-game items, with which I have no issue; however, you can also consume it to give yourself temporary special powers. The more you use it, the more you need next time. I don't approve of this aspect of spice, so never did use it except once to complete a main-story quest that teaches you how to use it and twice by accident. It's apparently addictive, so if you don't keep consuming it Bad Things happen; I don't know what these Bad Things are, because I didn't ever scoff enough to get hooked — just enough to turn the whites of my eyes blue.

I was pretty well set up when I quit, with plenty of money and a couple of well-sited bases. I was intending to leave when the impending server merges were implemented. They need to be implemented, too, because in my entire time in the game I only ever saw two other player characters, one each in the two main villages (Atreides: decent people; Harkonen: full-on authoritarian tyrants) (I went with Atreides). I also saw a buggy going around once that must have been driven by a player, and on my last day saw an ornithopter heading home in the deep desert (which is end-game land).

The reason I quit yesterday rather than waiting for the server merges as intended is that I was flying my ornithopter in the deep desert over a ship I'd just seen crash when suddenly a sandworm came out of nowhere and ate me, ornithopter and all. I felt this was a little disappointing. It isn't quite permadeath, but you do lose everything you have on you (plus your vehicle, if you were in one). However, the options offered to me this time concerning where to respawn seemed to imply that I wouldn't lose everything unless I respawned in a different zone. I hadn't been eaten by a sandworm in the deep desert before (although I had been three times in the Hagga Basin, which is where the non-end game is set), so figured that perhaps death-by-sandworm was different there. Because of this, I chose my temporary base in the deep desert as my respawn site, only to learn that I had indeed lost my ornithopter and everything that I had on me; I was standing in my underwear with nothing to my name but the emergency bottle of water that I'd left in the base. That wasn't going to be enough to fly me back to civilisation. Oh, and the whole zone is wiped by a storm once a week, so the base won't be there on Tuesday (this is why it's temporary and ill-equipped). It wouldn't take me more than an hour to gear back up at either of my other bases, but to get to them from the temporary one I would have had to have somehow found the materials to construct a new ornithopter and the machines to make it, before the desert consumed my temporary base. That seemed unlikely. There is a place there where you can hire an NPC pilot to fly you back, but as I didn't have any cash on me, and the place I could have looted to get some was a flight away, so that wasn't an option.

OK, so I could have just stood in the sun until I died of thirst and then respawned at a different base, but I figured that as I was planning on quitting soon anyway, it may as well be now.

Overall, Dune: Awakening was more fun than I expected it to be, from a designer perspective. I can see that a good many players might tire of the grinding for materials, but that's what you can expect from survival games so it's not as if they wouldn't have been forewarned.

Hmm, which MMO to play next? I think maybe I'll try Pax Dei.

8:01am on Friday, 14th November, 2025:

Tytus

Weird

I don't know what this man did to merit a statue, but the way it's posed leads me to conclude that he invented the commode.

8:54am on Thursday, 13th November, 2025:

Trends in Car Design

Anecdote

One of the books I bought at the NSPCC book fair was Eagle Annual 9, from 1959. It's a wonderful trove of mid-20th Century British thinking packaged for the consumption of boys.

Here, for example, are the illustrations accompanying an article called "Trends in Car Design":

The fact that today's cars largely look the same as each other somewhat belies this 1950s optimism.

8:56am on Wednesday, 12th November, 2025:

Handles

Weird

These handles on the back of chairs are a great idea! They make the chairs so much easier to move.

They're also good for taking out a child's eye as they run past. Maybe making them rounded would be a worthwhile consideration.

10:27am on Tuesday, 11th November, 2025:

History

Anecdote

Yesterday evening, I gave a presentation in the Virtual Worlds Museum about the history of virtual worlds.

As is often the case when a new technology arrives, those who practise it tend to think that all that went before it is of little relevance. Black-and-white silent movies were dismissed by sound movies, which were dismissed by colour movies, which were dismissed by 3D movies, and so on — yet they were all movies.

The Virtual World Museum is mainly about virtual worlds in the sense of VR/XR, with a social and building focus. The people they interact with are aware of games, but not really concerned with them. Because VR social worlds are seen as being distinct from game worlds, the people working in that domain are now learning for the first time some of what we've known about in games for quite a while (the example that most struck me yesterday was their discovery of the concept of parasocial relationships).

The Virtual World Museum exists because so many VR social worlds come into being then disappear, meaning that anything anyone creates in them is lost. They have a teleportal that connects to multiple virtual worlds in a nicely-visualised fashion, which is quite impressive. It reminds me of some of the maps of the Internet we had back in the day (although those were on paper, of course).

My presentation was 15 minutes long and concerned the history of virtual worlds. The short length was because I wasn't the only speaker, and in a VR environment people don't want to wear the headsets for more than an hour or so. It was an edited version of the slides I put together, made to look nice by the organisers of the event. You can see it at https://mud.co.uk/richard/VWM.pdf. It's necessarily short, as I said, so if you want to see the source that I developed it from, that would be my CE217 lecture 1, which I've uploaded to https://mud.co.uk/richard/CE31701.pdf. It's the full lecture, so is topped and tailed with irrelevances about the module, but the bulk of it is virtual-world history stuff.

I had trouble with my microphone using the Engage system that interfaced to the presentation venue. It worked fine the first time I tried it, but the second time it didn't. I think Google Meet may have messed with it, but it could have been my security software. Fortunately, in anticipation of this, I'd loaded Engage onto my laptop and it worked fine from there, although apparently I sounded a little tinny. I have a cold at the moment, though, so some degree of tinniness might have compensated with the stuffiness to make me sound more human.

The audience at the presentation were very polite, given that they were all rigged up in VR gear watching a stiff character read from slides. Still, that's what my students used to have to put up with, so I can legitimately claim it's my presentational style.

9:45am on Monday, 10th November, 2025:

Poznan Cathedral

Weird

I search for a secret door.

12:09pm on Sunday, 9th November, 2025:

Jeffrey

Weird

I guess you should have returned that book you borrowed in 2006, Jeffrey.

10:07am on Saturday, 8th November, 2025:

Wulff

Anecdote

As a break from showing you one-off weirdnesses I encountered on my recent trips abroad, here are some playing cards that arrived while I was away:

These are by Adolph Wulff of Copenhagen, a name I haven't come across before. I usually buy old playing cards for one of two reasons: they're old and British; they're old and pretty. I bought these because they were old and I thought they were pretty.

Given that they are pretty, though, how come I haven't seen more playing cards published by Wolff? Any company that could print cards looking like this ought to have done well. Ah, well it turns out that Wolff didn't print the cards, they just designed them; the cards were printed by Dondorff, the German company that's my favourite manufacturer of playing cards. That's why they look so gorgeous.

[Aside: the moment I typed that word, my wife commented on the weather saying "It looks gorgeous out there". There's definitely something fishy going on with this universe right now.]

The cards definitely are by Dondorff, too, because the Jack of Clubs has the Wolff logo on it; Dondorff always put the company logo on the Jack of Clubs. Also, the flimsy packet they come in has the same flimsy tab on it that Dondorff's flimsy packets do.

As for how old these care are, well therein lies a problem. The packet says that this is an "Elite No. 80 m/Guldhj (Eneret)" deck, which according to the World Web Playing Cards Museum (a site I trust) it is indeed. The "Eneret" means that Wulff had exclusive rights to the images; the Guldhj refers to the fact that the corners of the cards are edged in gold leaf. The WWPCM calls the cards "Luxusspiel" rather than "Elite", but that's probably because this is what Dondorff called them in their catalogue.

The deck is supposed to include a Joker, but there isn't one. OK, well some people collect Jokers and will happily take them while leaving the rest of the deck incomplete. I disapprove of this, but it happens. On the other hand, it perhaps never had a Joker in the first place, because there are variations in packs that aren't always known to the WWPCM. This isn't therefore the problem I have here.

The problem is that the WWPCM dates these cards 1920-1933 (Dondorff having closed in 1933). That's fair enough, but if you look at the Ace of Diamonds, you'll see there's a tax stamp on it. According to the Tax Stamps web site I use (which I also trust), this stamp was only used from 1890 to 1918, whereupon the colour changed to green. Sometimes, a tax office might take a year or so to switch over to a new stamp, but not a new colour, and not two years.

So, 1918 doesn't intersect with 1920-1933, which is where the problem lies. Denmark was neutral in World War I, so could trade with Germany; the cards could indeed have been imported in 1920. The tax stamp is at least two years earlier, though.

I'll go with 1918, I think. The absence of a Joker could indicate the cards predated the ones catalogued as "Luxusspiel", and although I have come across cards bearing tax stamps several years after their supposed end of use, that usually only happens when they're stamped in the country of manufacture; Denmark stamped its cards on import. War or civil unrest could be a factor, but Denmark wasn't at war during this period. 1918 seems about right.

They're still a pretty set of cards, though, however old they are.

10:05am on Friday, 7th November, 2025:

Painting

Weird

This painting was on the wall in the hotel where I stayed last week.

Judging by the hands, I think it must be AI-generated.

9:18am on Thursday, 6th November, 2025:

Apples

Anecdote

One of the excursions we undertook in Astuirias, en route to a restaurant, was to a cider manufacturer. As I understand it, they take as many apples as they can get hold of, squash them in a pneumatic press, then leave them in chestnut barrels with a 10,000-litre capacity until they turn into cider.

Here's what part of the "take as many apples as they can get hold of" stage looks like:

The apples are too small to be satisfactory for eating, but that's irrelevant when it comes to squashing them into cider-producing mulch.

The tour guide pronounced apples as "ay-pells". This must be what comes of having a preponderance of books that assert "A is for apple".

9:45am on Wednesday, 5th November, 2025:

Grinch

Weird

Seen in Poznan:

Even the graffiti artists are starting Christmas early nowadays.

9:09am on Tuesday, 4th November, 2025:

13:21

Weird

I took this photograph of a fancy monumental clock when I was in Poznan last month.

The clock would have been even more impressive had the time not been 12:45.

9:07am on Monday, 3rd November, 2025:

The Last Book Fair

Anecdote

It was the annual NSPCC book fair over the weekend. According to the Essex County Standard, it was the last one. There aren't enough volunteers to keep it going. The problem isn't the running of the book fair itself, but the leading-up to it when all the books, jigsaws, DVDs and games that have been handed in need to be collected and sorted.

This is a real shame, because a good number of people used to visit it every year. I was there yesterday with my younger daughter about half an hour after it opened and the car park was already nearly full, even though the weather was inclement.

It was clear inside the hall that the fair was on the decline. Normally, there are boxes of books underneath almost all of the tables, ready to be used to replenish supplies. This year, there were hardly any. The older books (which are the ones I like) were almost entirely absent, as if they'd been filtered out beforehand and sold to professional dealers, or picked up by app-using amateurs at 9am on Saturday when it opened.

Then again, it might simply be that the people of Colchester have already offloaded their book collections in previous book fairs. There does still seem to be an appetite for physical books, whether fiction or non-fiction, for adults or children, plain or pictorial.

It was sad to see some books that were popular during my childhood languishing among more superficial modern ones. OK, so I've never actually read Heidi or Black Beauty, but most of the girls I knew had. I think Mr Galliano's Circus was read out it class. All three were in the same box at the book fair. I doubt any of them were likely to be bought.

My daughter bought three books for her 4½-month-old son, and I bought two for myself. One was a book of puzzles ostentatiously entitled Intelligence Games, which I saw when it came out and deemed too expensive. Available for £1..50 at the book fair, I decided to take a punt on it.

The other book I bought was the Eagle Annual 9, published in 1959. When I used to stay with my grandparents, they had several books that I and my brother would like to read, including Buffalo Bill annuals and Eagle annuals. My grandmother gave them away when we grew up, which is a shame because I had a strong sentimental attachment to them. Eagle Annual 9 wasn't one of them, but it did feature the same cartoon characters and the same mix of factual and fictional prose. I shall doubtless be returning to it in future posts, because some of the 1950s attitudes expressed within its pages are somewhat at odds with those of the present day. I don't think Cecil Rhodes was quite the paradigm of goodness that the cartoon about his life suggests, for example.

It's sad to see the book fair go. I hope it can be resurrected, but if not then I'll be donating my old books piecemeal to other charities instead. Thinking about it, I've never once seen any of the books I've donated to the book fair over the years actually for sale there, so either they went for recycling or were snapped up by eager readers.

I think I'd maybe have sent this one straight to recycling if it were mine, though.

8:15am on Sunday, 2nd November, 2025:

Sultry

Weird

On the flight from Barcelona to Gatwick yesterday, there was girl aged maybe 8 or 9 who had a most unnervingly sultry voice. She wasn't putting it on, it was her natural way of speaking. She only said things that 9-year-old girls nolly say ("Stop doing that, William" to her brother; "There's no row thirteen"; "Where should I put my bag?") but she sounded as if she was a femme fatale seducing the leading man in a film noire. I had to look round to check it really was she who was saying it.

I don't suppose there are many talent agents who fly Vueling, but if one of them ever hears her speak elsewhere she'll be signed up for voice-acting in a trice.

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