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The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.

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8:26am on Saturday, 10th October, 2026:

Continued

Weird

From this week's Essex County Standard:

Page 42 continues the sentence with "national award".

Suddenly lurching to another page won't hide that use of "in the running" to refer to someone whose free time is spent literally running. I can't believe it's a deliberate pun, as the ECS is always so proud of those that it makes a big fuss of them. It's more a case of a subconscious connection between the topic of the article and a particular turn of phrase that could easily be replaced by another.

It's a weird place to put an article break, whatever.

9:19am on Friday, 9th October, 2026:

Adrift

Weird

This is another example of something you occasionally see in MMORPGs: cropping of the back of the head but not the rest of the head.

This is also from Embers Adrift , which has been down for a few days due to a hardware problem at thee server end. I don't know whether I'll bother playing it again, despite having just bought another month's subscription. It's old-school in many respects, such as having to run for your bag when your character is killed, and it has an interesting mechanic whereby if you kill a mob close to one of its movable dungeons ("ember veins") then it could come back immediately at half strength (its ember version). This means you start off fighting one mob, then it becomes two, and any passing mobs that see you and join in could also become two. I've started a fight with one mob and ended up having to kill eight of them.

The game is very grindy. There's content for groups (and I did join a guild this time round, which I don't usually do so in an MMO I'm expecting to leave after a few weeks), but little for solo players. There are also content deserts for group play. I'm currently level 38 out of 50, and progress is very slow. The only way to get experience points and go up levels is to kill mobs or do zone-based noticeboard quests to kill a number of specific mobs. Other quests give no XP except incidentally, by having to kill a ton of mobs between you and the treasure. Unfortunately, one of the zones I've been grinding mobs in gave me a noticeboard quest to kill ten or so hard mobs (which I did) plus three more such mobs of a particular kind. These mobs are only available inside or next to a specific moveable dungeon, and are too high a level for me even to scratch. I'm having to do similar quests in a different zone where the mobs don't give me as much XP. Most of these involve killing spiders. I've killed over 800 of them so far, and the quests keep coming. Grinding is always boring, but Embers Adrift takes it to a new level. I get some kind of reward if I kill a thousand of them.

All mobs hate player characters. Almost all are friends with all other mobs, but there are some set-piece fights between particular mobs (a specific big cat that wanders will attack a specific spiny bunny if they meet up). The default is that they're all chummy: you find wolves and bears co-existing with deer, and raccoons living alongside crocodiles and giant spiders. Nothing seems to eat rats, not even rats.

There are some odd balance problems. Story quests that are super-hard and need a group to complete give a reward of gear that's below the gear level you needed to have to complete them. Simple quests to introduce you to a zone are often much, much harder to complete than finding your own way. Crafting is no more difficult than gathering, and does produce useful items. I really don't need a couple of hundred healing potions, though.

The game does have a lot of charm, though, and has so few players that socially it feels like an old-style text MUD except with graphics. There isn't a lot of information about it online, so you have to ask other players or work things out yourself rather than simply look it up. Having a small population is quite refreshing, and one of the reasons I joined a guild. I wasn't expecting to spend 339 hours playing it when I started, but I have done so far. I might drop in to tell my guildies I'm considering quitting, but they themselves may not be around for much longer as they're thinking of leaving too (for Monsters and Memories, which a couple of them played in the beta). My character is a healer, as usual, which is very useful for group content; as there's no group content to do in this level range, though, they're not missing much by my absence.

As for what I'll be playing when I do quit, well it's BAFTA time so I've been trying out some of the games on the Best Game list (there's nearly a hundred of them, of which I've played 31 so far at a rate of two or three a day). Some of these are very good, and I'll be coming back to them later. Others are reworkings of other games, or the same mechanics with different dressings. Some are original but don't work, although others do. A few need VR goggles, so I won't be playing those, and there are several that have a theme I don't like so I'll put those off until I can grit my teeth enough to give them a shot.

Oh, and I may have taken advantage of Embers Adrift's hardware problems to start up a character in Aion 2, too.

8:38am on Thursday, 8th October, 2026:

Football Manager 2024

Weird

I'm still playing Football Manager 2024, and am currently top of the Premier League with Burnley. It's not that I care much for Burnley, but they offered me a job after they were relegated to the Championship, so I took it as a way to get into the Premiership the following season.

Anyway, this game takes almost a minute to load. Its opening screen shows a team celebrating the scoring of a goal. Here's the centrepiece of it:

The chap on the right seems to be showing a level of admiration for the scorer that goes beyond "hooray, you scored a goal".

Although there are doubtless scores, if not hundreds, of gay male professional footballers right now, there are currently none in the top four divisions who are out of the closet. Contrast this with the case for female professional footballers, where there are so many that some of the non-gay players feel obliged to wear mascara to signal the fact that they're straight.

I don't know if the Football Manager 2024 title screen is deliberately trying to break down barriers, but even if it isn't, I guess it could be helping to do so regardless.

Oh, and if anyone knows how to beat a 4-2-2-2 formation, let me know. I'm having trouble with Manchester United.

8:44am on Wednesday, 7th October, 2026:

Noble Effort

Weird

From the BBC news web site yesterday:

Isn't it more like the distant universe shedding light on us?

Well, neutrinos, anyway.

8:34am on Tuesday, 6th October, 2026:

Uphill

Weird

No matter what the game, deer always look wrong when walking uphill.

This one was from Embers Adrift, if you were wondering, but it could have been any RPG with deer in it.

8:23am on Monday, 5th October, 2026:

Overheard

Anecdote

Overheard from a neighbour's garden.

Middle-Class Female Voice #1: Helloooo!
Middle-Class Female Voice #1: Bloody hell! Jesus fucking Christ! You scared the shit out of me!

Well, this is Essex.

8:16am on Sunday, 4th October, 2026:

Grimaud

Anecdote

I bought some more playing cards.

These were very cheap — under a tenner — but they're over a hundred years old. They were made by B. P. Grimaud of Paris, a manufacturer I like because of some sumptuous decks they put out in their heyday.

This, as you can see, is not a sumptuous deck. It's a standard English pattern, and is patience-sized. It looks fairly modern, but the tax stamp on the Ace of Clubs was only in use 1890-1917 and 1922-1940. This particular design of the Ace of Spades was brought in at around 1915, as was the Jolly Joker; furthermore, the joker was very soon replaced by one without the frame. We're probably looking at 1915, then, but let's say 1915-1917 to be safe.

I'm not really interested in any of the cards except for the Ace of Spades and the Joker, both of which are very unusual. My guess is that no-one else is, either, which is why I could buy it for £9.48.

8:42am on Saturday, 3rd October, 2026:

Phone Booth

Weird

When I was at Queen Mary University London for the BIGGI conference last month, I encountered this phone booth near Mile End tube station.

It's looked much the same for several years. I don't know who operates it (it's painted black, so it's not one of BT's), and the handset has been torn off its cable so it couldn't be used to phone anyone anyway. I think it may have once doubled up as an ATM, but I doubt it serves that function now.

However, judging by the rust at the bottom and the stains on the footpath, it does seem to be enjoying a useful existence as a public lavatory.

I'm sure all the students who come to QMUL to study are thrilled to have this authentic example of British culture right on their doorstep.

8:26am on Friday, 2nd October, 2026:

Not Every Thursday

Anecdote

It's not every Thurday that my evening meal consists of two three-sausages and ketchup butties followed by polishing off a tub of ice cream.

However, it's not every Thursday that my wife goes to a concert in Bristol with our elder daughter, leaving me home by myself.

8:26am on Thursday, 1st October, 2026:

Victor Hugo

Weird

I play Football Manager using procedurally-generated players, rather than real ones. Occasionally, the names it produces at random are somewhat familiar.

I had a hunch he'd show up.

8:46am on Wednesday, 30th September, 2026:

More

Miscellaneous

I don't know how this development in Southwark got its name, but I'd have thought there was quite enough London already.

Streets are often named for marketing purposes. It's an established practice in England for new estates to be made up of cutesy collections of mews, groves, vales, rises, chases, heaths, gardens and crofts, despite the roads in question's having no relationship to the meaning of any of those words. That doesn't mean it's a good idea, though.

The street I grew up on, The Crescent, actually was crescent-shaped. The developers could have called it The Arc if they'd been more mathematically inclined, but then they'd have had to have built a triumphal arch at one end to pacify francophiles.

8:33am on Tuesday, 29th September, 2026:

Lookups

Weird

When you go to the Merriam-Webster thesaurus site, it gives a running update of the top thesaurus lookups every 30 seconds. At times of low usage, the later ones in the top ten are usually arranged in alphabetical order, suggesting that only one person has looked them up in the past half-minute. As I write this, for example, the lower six are: accomplish, accuracy, altruism, amazing, balance and ban. This means that if they're not in alphabetical order, or they are but none begin with A, more than one person has looked the term up in the past thirty seconds.

Here's what I saw there a couple of days ago:

This was on a word-lookup page, so I only got the top seven of the top ten.

I don't know why more than one person was looking for a synonym of that fifth one on the list, nor do I want to know.

The lower six have now changed to: absorb, accountable, accuracy, achieve, afflict and amazing.

See how I used "lower" to avoid using "bottom" there.

8:38am on Monday, 28th September, 2026:

Simulator

Weird

Here's another weirdly alarming game that showed up in my Steam discovery queue recently.

I'm sure that the developers would hide behind the word "parody" if challenged about it.

8:34am on Sunday, 27th September, 2026:

Drone Show

Anecdote

Yesterday and the day before there was an evening drone show in Colchester's Castle Park. We didn't go to it, because it was themed for the story of Alice in Wonderland and meant for children, but we could see it from our house.

That's it, there, on the horizon.

Zooming in, it was possible to see some of the action. This is a mouse about to meet a dodo:

The view through my telescope was much better, as I could see the individual drones close-up. I needed a more stable base for it than one leg on a windowsill, though.

Most of the images were static, with movement coming from turning lights on and off (Cheshire cat fades leaving only its grin, smoke appears from a chimney — that sort of thing). I thought they'd maybe have used animation software to produce the necessary controls, but it was more a 3D-printing set-up by the look of things. Still, I might go to one if there's a better subject, as it does look the kind of thing that's worth seeing at least once.

The most important take-away is that I now know for sure where Castle Park is when viewed from our house.

8:05am on Saturday, 26th September, 2026:

Victims

Weird

From this week's Essex County Standard:

Does that include crimes against punctuation?

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Copyright © 2026 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).