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The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.

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8:33am on Saturday, 23rd May, 2026:

The East

Rant

When a word in English ends in a vowel sound and is followed by another word that begins with one, it interrupts the flow of a sentence. Therefore, a filler sound is inserted between them to make them easier to say. The first vowel sound may be modified, too.

For example, if you say "the cat" then there's no problem. The "the" sounds the same as it would in "the dog", it's like a "thuh". However, if you were to say "the other cat" then the usual solution is to insert a "y" sound and change the "thuh" to "thi". This makes it sound like "thiyother cat".

That's how it's been for centuries, at least where I come from. However, back in the 1980s I noticed that some Londoners didn't do this. They kept the "the" sound as "thuh" and put a glottal stop in as the filler. It would be like "the'other cat". I was told once that this came from the speech patterns of immigrants from the Caribbean, but I don't know if that's true or not.

Anyway, recently the continuity announcer on our local TV channel TV has started to refer to the news programmes in our region as being in "the 'east" rather than "thi yeast". Worse, the presenters have started to do this, too, when they never did it before. I don't know whether it's as a result of some directive or just the spread of a speech affectation. It annoys me, anyway.

I'll have to listen out to hear whether they pronounce something like "solo opening" as "solowopening" or "solo'opening".

I'd blame social media,. but that would just ba a different kind of trend-following.

8:14am on Friday, 22nd May, 2026:

Webs

Anecdote

The fruit trees in our garden are infested with some kind of moth. The caterpillars are abundant, and my wife hates them. She cut off a swathe of leaves they'd made their homes and put them in the brown wheelie bin we use for garden waste recycling.

Of course, they were still alive.

There were hundreds of them. Overnight, they crawled out and covered the bin with webs of silk.

That pale brown isn't the plastic fading from sunlight, it's the mass of webs.

I gave them a dose of fly spray. It turns out that they really don't like it, so most of them are now dead. However, my wife stopped me before I did the final side of the bin, in case I killed any bees that might have been nearby. As a result, the caterpillars may have been able to reach the ground along the single-line vertical web they'd built. I guess we'll find out next year if our roses are covered in the little blighters.

Do your job, birds!

8:10am on Thursday, 21st May, 2026:

Sweet

Weird

Putting digital googly eyes on murderous-looking sweet potatoes really helps make them less of a fountain of nightmares.

8:17am on Wednesday, 20th May, 2026:

What Happened Here?

Weird

This was on one of the interactive screens at Bletchley Park.

So, how many purpose-built buildings for tabulating machines are there in the world, exactly?

This is giving off the same vibes as the "Come to Ireland to see the biggest harp in Ireland" sign I saw at Dublin airport once.

8:52am on Tuesday, 19th May, 2026:

Pint of Science

Anecdote

I gave a short presentation at the Pint of Science event in Colchester yesterday evening.

The idea behind this is that scientists describe their work to an intelligent audience that's not familiar with the topic, in a pub. Colchester is short of scientists, because Essex University has closed most of its science departments over the years, so Computer Science experts get called in to talk. It sounded as if it might be fun, so I volunteered.

It was indeed fun, too. Because this was a general audience, I gave a 20-minute presentation about the ethics of dealing with sapient NPCs once we have sapient NPCs. It was basically a cut-down version of a presentation I gave in 2019 at the IEEE Conference on Games. I'll upload it when I get around to it.

I gave out three copies of my book, How to Be a God, to members of the audience, and said anyone else who was interested could download a free PDF of it from http://howtobeagod.com/. They won't finish it, because no-one ever does, but it's conceivable that I might have sold a physical book to someone before they realise this.

For taking part, I was given a pint glass:

Quite what I'll do with a pint glass featuring a brain that's wearing glasses, I don't know. I'm thinking I could drink out of it maybe.

The event took place at the Three Wise Monkeys pub in Colchester, which is big and part of a chain. The room that was hired out was next to the pub's kitchen.

The employees of the pub aren't the only ones at work there.

If there were any public health inspectors in the Pint of Science audience, they can wave cheerio to their level 5 food hygiene rating.

It's Three Wise Monkeys and a Mouse.

8:24am on Monday, 18th May, 2026:

Handbags

Weird

One of the things I noticed at Bletchley Park last week was that in all the reconstructions, every desk occupied by a woman had a handbag on the floor by the chair.

Maybe it was so that women who were spies could be quickly identified by the fact they didn't put their handbag on the floor by their chair.

8:29am on Sunday, 17th May, 2026:

Eurovision Song Contest

Comment

Yesterday was the 2026 Eurovision Song Contest.

As usual, we watched it. As usual, the UK came last. The winners, Bulgaria, got a mere 516 times more points than we did.

There were some real stinkers this year, but they all got more points than our song managed. Ours wasn't ever going to win, but it was significantly better than some of those out there. If any other country had entered our song (with the possible exception of Germany), they would have scored respectably higher. If we had entered any other country's song (including Bulgaria's), we would still have come last.

However, given that we expect to come last, this isn't actually painful for us. Hey, we're plucky!

I did learn something interesting (to me at least) about the UK's performer, Look Mum No Computer. This is the stage name of Sam Battle — but Sam Battle is in turn a stage name. I had heard that he started to use it when someone misheard his actual surname and put it on the venue's billing, but I didn't hear what it should have said.

It turns out that his surname is Bartle. His sister, Jodie Bartle, is a professional footballer who captains Wrexham.

It's conceivable that we're distantly related, because their family comes from Lincolnshire, which is where my line of the Bartle diaspora originated. The furthest I can get back is my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather John Bartle, who was the father of my great-great-great-great-grandfather, also called John Bartle; the latter was baptised 24 Feb 1719 in Kirton-in-Lindsey.

Sadly, knowledge of this genealogical connection to me came too late for the citizens of Europe to take pity on our Eurovision entrant.

I wonder how much Dua Lipa would want paying to perform our 2027 entry.

9:59am on Saturday, 16th May, 2026:

Know your Clientele

Weird

The owners of this establishment in Italy seem to have found their niche.

It's in Manarola, if you fancy ordering a delivery.

9:15am on Friday, 15th May, 2026:

Bletchley Park

Anecdote

We went for a day out to Bletchley Park yesterday, to look around the codebreaking museum.

It was quite interesting. I didn't know that there were 9,000 people working there at its peak, nor that there were 211 Bombe machines in action to help decrypt the Enigma code.

Whenever I look at human endeavours of the past, I'm always impressed by two things: the level of functioning organisation required, and the degree of initiative aforded the individuals involved. Bletchley Park was like a factory with people as components, but they were given a lot of freedom to act as they saw fit. The processes were sophisticated, but fluid. People weren't continually given more and more work until it occupied their every waking moment: they had the time to notice things, to experiment, to relax. This was true across the board, whatever your job was. I don't doubt that it applied to cooks and chauffeurs, too.

Contrast that with today, when people keep getting work piled on their plate until they can do no more. Management interferes, making demands that can only be met by cutting back on something else. The people in charge have ambitions to be more in charge. The people who do the work just want to go home and get some sleep.

The people of the past weren't as advanced technologically as we are today, but they weren't stupid.

I think they may have maybe put up a screen rather than projecting onto a wall with a radiator on it.

8:28am on Thursday, 14th May, 2026:

Too Close

Weird

I haven't seen this level of authoritarianism in a street sign before.

It gives the impression there's something to hide down there.

9:45am on Wednesday, 13th May, 2026:

Citations

Outburst

In Volume I of Designing Virtual Worlds, 2nd edition, I list the reasons why I include citations:

They're of direct interest to designers.
They're creative (these are mainly games or virtual worlds).
They back up some assertions I've made that sceptics might not believe.
I'm quoting from or paraphrasing them.
They're examples of something I've just mentioned.
So that you can follow up a topic without having to endure my bowdlerisation of it.
They're cool.

Citations take a lot longer to get right than you might think. There are some papers that are cited dozens or hundreds of times, but when you try to find the source so you can read them (I always read what I cite) it's nigh impossible. The references themselves may be incomplete, omitting key information such as what month of the year some article appeared in in a monthly publication. Sorting all this out takes time. Even adding a new reference to a modern research paper takes a good five or ten minutes, because often you need information that isn't directly presented (ISSN numbers, city of publication names, editor names, ...).

Fortunately, over the years I've written many books and papers, so have a corpus of papers for which I've already done the citation donkey work. These are all stored in Microsoft Word's citation system. It's not bad as it goes, and you can create a bibliography automatically at the end of the work that lists all the papers you've cited in whatever format you want (APA, Chicago, ISO 690, Harvard — not IEEE, though). There are some annoyances, for example the bibliography won't include citations that only appear in footnotes, and it doesn't make a distinction between "This is true (Smith, 2026)" and "Smith (2026) says this is true" — it uses the first format in both cases — but generally it makes life a lot easier.

Unfortunately, although the list of stored citations doesn't have a limit to the number of references in it, when you want to select one to insert into the text then then it does. Word builds a list of all the papers you have made available to the work, so you can choose the one you want. This list is in alphabetical order, but has a maximum length. I have so many papers cited in the book I'm currently working on, Volume II of Designing Virtual Worlds, 2nd edition, that the list cuts off mid-way through W. If the leading author is Waite, their paper will appear in the list, but if it's Wright then they won't.

This means that if I want to cite a new paper by someone called Young, say, it won't appear in the list. Neither would it appear if I copied an existing paper by Young from my global list to the book-specific one. It's in the database (I can edit it, and I can add more references), but it's not in the list of references I can choose from to put in the text. What I have to do to insert the citation is change the author's surname to AAAYoung, so it will appear at the top of the truncated list of papers that I can site, then after I've inserted it, change it back to Young. This is a tiresome way to have to do things, and would go away if Microsoft allowed pull-down lists to be of arbitrary length. The program knows in advance how many elements there will be in the list, so it's not as if it needs to allocate a fixed amount of space and then stop when it's full.

I am aware there are other word-processors out there and assorted citation-management tools, but that's no use to me if my papers list is in Microsoft's format.

The book is due to be completed by the end of 2023, by the way. I may be running a little late with it.

8:04am on Tuesday, 12th May, 2026:

Size

Weird

This church was probably once the tallest building in the parish.

Greater gods are worshipped now.

9:09am on Monday, 11th May, 2026:

Beano

Anecdote

When we went to the car boot sale last weekend, I spotted this crate full of old copies of The Beano.

I suspected that eBay is a better place than a car boot sale to try to sell an issue from Jan 31 1987, so had a quick look. They go for about £5 for a job lot of ten issues, so that#s 50p each, which is 32p more than they cost at the time. However, since 18p from 1987 is worth about 53p today, according to the Bank of England's inflation calculator, they're not a good investment.

I don't know how much the owner wanted for his comics (he was selling the entire crateload as a single item), because I didn't look. I have better things to do with my time than sorting them into groups of ten to flog to collectors. Also, my wife was with me, and her primary reason for going to care boot sales is to buy nothing.

8:25am on Sunday, 10th May, 2026:

BBBC

Weird

Seen in an in-flight magazine:

This looks to be one of those products that sells entirely on its name.

I haven't looked up what it does, as I'm afraid of what I might find.

8:44am on Saturday, 9th May, 2026:

Infinite Accumulation

Comment

This structure has been outside Liverpool Street station for the past 18 months, but I hadn't seen it up close until this week.

There ought to be some law decreeing that large works of abstract art in public spaces should have an easy-to-find plaque close by, explaining what the artwork is and who made it. I had to look it up when I got home: apparently, it's called "Infinite Accumulation" and was created by Yayoi Kusama, who was commissioned to create it as part of the Crossrail project that resulted in the Elizabeth Line (or the Lizzie Line, as I like to call it).

According to Kusama, "The spheres symbolise unique personalities while the supporting curvilinear lines allow us to imagine an underpinning social structure".

Yes, right. This would be the same Yayoi Kusama whose artwork began to feature polka dots in 1939 when she was aged 10. Those are basically polka dots in 3D.

Now we have large language models at our disposal, it's much easier for artists to concoct an explanation of what their works mean.

I want easy-to-find plaques!

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