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The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.

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7:55am on Wednesday, 24th April, 2024:

More Matters

Anecdote

It's time for the mid-week drop of Bhéwonom chapters. With luck, this time I won't post it as a comment to someone else's post on Facebook and the people there will see it.

Matters 16-20 are available for direct download at https://www.youhaventlived.com/bh%c3%a9wonom/Matters%2016-20.pdf. The titles are:
Matter 16: Hamas Commander’s Luck Runs Out
Matter 17: Experiment VA2
Matter 18: Spiritwing 2
Matter 19: The Rule of Revereshow
Matter 20: The Elevator Incident

As usual, all the Matters so far can be found at www.bhéwonom.com.

There is a novel emerging out of all this, honest!

1:59pm on Tuesday, 23rd April, 2024:

43 to 1

Anecdote

The square photos are what resulted when I gave Midjourney my graduation photo (in the top left corner) and the prompt "https://mud.co.uk/temporary/RAB.jpg color portrait photograph of a new graduate --v 6.0 --no hat".

It took 44 attempts before it produced a picture of a student who's recognisably male. The only one that came close before then was the other one with glasses (5 along in row 3, with the unattached tassel from the mortarboard), which at full size has some whiskers on the chin.

There are many versions that change my ethnicity, but way, way more that change my gender. I don't think I look female in that picture, but maybe that would explain why I didn't have any luck with girls when I was in my teens.

Try it out yourself if you don't believe me. Putting the word "male" before "student" fixes the problem, but I wonder why there's a problem in the first place. I'm thinking it's the hair.

After I mis-spelled "colour" for it, too!

My wife thinks this is hilarious....

12:28pm on Tuesday, 23rd April, 2024:

Revision

Anecdote

I write down all my appointments in a physical diary, so I don't have to try to synchronise the three or four online diaries that various organisations believe are the only one I should use. I do have the online diaries, I just don't see why I should tell the university what I'm doing during periods the university isn't paying me for my time.

While I was asleep last night, it occurred to me that I probably had a revision lecture soon. I knew I had two in April, but didn't recall seeing them in my diary. When I awoke, I checked my diary and there was nothing there about any revision lectures, so I checked online.

Hmm. Turns out there was one at 9am today.

Fortunately, I was able to get to the university in time to deliver the lecture, but it rather knocked my plans for the day out of whack.

All this happened because I wrote the revision lecture back in October, before I'd bought my 2024 diary.

My other revision is next week. That one now is in the diary.

9:25am on Monday, 22nd April, 2024:

Supermarionation

Anecdote

Over the weekend, we went to the Supermarionation exhibition currently on at Colchester Castle. A few old favourites were on display, including:

Steve Zodiac out of Fireball XL5.

Scott Tracy out of Thunderbirds.

Parker and Lady Penelope out of Thunderbirds.

Melody Angel and Rhapsody Angel out of Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons.

Captain Scarlet out of Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons.

Elsewhere in the museum was this small bust of "Emperor Scarlet".

One of the people who was looking at the Supermarionation exhibition thought was a genuine Roman relic rather than a joke, and that the Captain Scarlet model had been based on him (I think he was actually based on Cary Grant, but could be wrong).

Disappointingly, almost all the puppets on display were replicas. Even the "original" works weren't all that impressive (Scott Tracy's chair is original, but it's original in the sense that it was the very one used to make a Kitkat advert in 1993).

The only puppets that actually were original, as in used in the original TV series, were Melody Angel and Rhapsody Angel. This was something of a silver lining to the cloud, as Rhapsody was one of my favourite characters; if I'd been told in 1967 that I'd one day get to meet her, 7-year-old me would have been thrilled.

The rest of the castle museum had fewer exhibits that it used to have, following its most recent revamp. Maybe it's so that schoolkids don't get bored so quickly, but it felt rather empty to me. If I was taking a visitor around, I'd have to warn them not to get their hopes up first.

10:51am on Sunday, 21st April, 2024:

Drop 3

Comment

It's time to drop the next five matters from Bhéwonom. No-one commented on the second set, which I take to be a sign that it's not going very well and I'll need to reorder, rewrite or remove some of it.

Anyway, here are matters 11-15, which you can download as a group from https://www.youhaventlived.com/bhéwonom/Matters%2011-15.pdf:
Matter 11: No Philosopher's Stone
Matter 12: Butterflies
Matter 13: The April 1st Ghost
Matter 14: Two Books
Matter 15: Experiment VA1

The first two drops remain accessible from http://www.bhéwonom.com/.

8:53am on Saturday, 20th April, 2024:

Symposium

Anecdote

We had an AI symposium at the university yesterday.

Jeez, those chairs in the STEM centre have been designed to look good, but they're dreadful for sitting on. They're way too hard. I can still feel the effects on my rump this morning.

7:41am on Friday, 19th April, 2024:

Else?

Weird

From Janet Murray's book, Inventing the Medium:

I've noticed that for some time, a lot of programmers haven't really used else clauses where we would have done 40 years ago. Conditional expressions are also largely ignored. Is it simply because compilers are now so good at optimising that they don't need to bother, or is there some other reason?

8:30am on Thursday, 18th April, 2024:

No New VC

Comment

Last year, the Vice Chancellor of Essex University decided to retire and handed in his notice, giving us a year to find a replacement.

An extensive international recruitment process was begun, but there were problems behind the scenes. Candidates were interviewed but either we turned them down or they turned us down (I don't know which, but probably both), so the search continued. It's hard to figure out exactly what happened, because all this happens behind closed doors for reasons of confidentiality; an unsuccessful candidate could have problems with their current institution if word of their ambitions got out. Nevertheless, we knew a month ago that there were still some issues, and yesterday all members of staff were sent an email saying that the recruitment process has not been successful and we're soon to be short one VC.

A professorial member of the University Senate will be appointed as acting VC in the meantime. There will definitely be candidates for this, because it's only for a year. Whether the acting VC will want to apply to become full-time VC when the advertisements go out again remains to be seen/

This reminds me of when we tried to appoint a replacement professor of computer games. Our requirements were set so high that world-class researchers weren't even approached, they were removed from the shortlist on the grounds that they didn't quite tick all the boxes. I don't know if it's the same with the search for a VC, but it certainly wouldn't surprise me if Essex University's own view of its status is somewhat higher than that of potential applicants for the post.

What's certainly true is that having a well-publicised £13.8m shortfall in the university's projected income next year won't make finding a replacement easier.

7:31am on Wednesday, 17th April, 2024:

Matters 6-10

Anecdote

It's time for the second drop of Bhéwonom chapters, for those stalwarts still with the series. They're available along with the first drop from http://www.bhéwonom.com, but the direct link is https://www.youhaventlived.com/bh%C3%A9wonom/Matters%206-10.pdf.

The titles are:
Matter 6: Letter of Apology
Matter 7: Document of Terminology
Matter 8: Saved
Matter 9: The Girl with the Spider Tattoos
Matter 10: Letter of Provenance

I'm already regretting the ordering; I should probably have put more of the interesting ones in among the plot-builders.

9:11am on Tuesday, 16th April, 2024:

Greetings to my Sweetheart

Anecdote

Here's a card that my great-uncle sent my great-aunt in the 1920s.

Here's what resulted when I gave those words as lyrics to https://suno.com/create with a style of "1920s": gtms.mp3.

It's jauntier than the card suggests, but still not bad.

The other version it produced (you get two for each prompt) was more of a dirge and was indeed bad.

8:23am on Monday, 15th April, 2024:

Handy

Weird

From the Lego exhibition I went to last week.

It's not just AI that has trouble with hands, then.

9:05am on Sunday, 14th April, 2024:

Aerial Anomalies

Weird

On the left, the Fortean Times's explanation of what UAP stands for on page 16. On the right, the Fortean Times's explanation of what UAP stands for on page 19.

This is why everyone still calls them UFOs.

12:15pm on Saturday, 13th April, 2024:

Bhéwonom

Anecdote

I finally finished the first draft of the third (and final) novel in my series about matters Dheghōm. This one is called Bhéwonom, although you'll need to have read both Dheghōm and Erwā to make sense of it.

It has more chapters than the other books, but they're generally shorter so I'll be dropping them five at a time to Bhéwonom.com. I'll also be putting each drop in a single .pdf file rather than separate ones, so you don't have to download all five separately.

Matters 1 to 5 are available directly from https://www.youhaventlived.com/bh%C3%A9wonom/Matters%201-5.pdf. Their titles are:
Matter 1: Catalogue of a Small but Valuable Collection
Matter 2: Marvell’s Spectral Walking
Matter 3: Wooden Koi Carp
Matter 4: The Hallowe’en Ghost
Matter 5: An Accord

Let me know what you think.

3:46pm on Friday, 12th April, 2024:

Unbroken

Anecdote

While avoiding the rain on Tuesday, er, I mean while considering options to improve our kitchenware on Tuesday, we went into Selfridges. It contained some interesting ideas, none of which were within my price range (or indeed my taste range), but still, worth a look.

Here are some plates and other chinaware designed to look as if they're made out of two broken ones stuck together.

You could get thirty seconds of conversation out of those at a dinner party.

I don't know what it is about shops that are named after people but don't put in an apostrophe. Harrods is the same. If they were named after more than one Selfridge or Harrod, fair enough, but they're not. Taylors of Harrogate is, so they get a pass, but Selfriges and Harrods don't.

This apostrophe-dropping practice is very widespread: we have W H Smiths, Boots, Morrisons, Currys, Halfords, Littlewoods, Jessops, ... . Of all the major retailers that immediately spring to mind, really only Sainsbury's has the apostrophe. Even banks, which you might think would want to appear more professional than mere shops, don't go with the apostrophe. Barclays, Lloyds, Coutts (which should be Coutts'). Dropping them for signage reasons is bad enough, but dropping them for the company's actual name is taking branding too far.

Maybe the idea is to get thirty seconds of conversation out of the name at dinner parties.

8:25am on Thursday, 11th April, 2024:

Leaflets

Comment

There are local elections coming up in early May, and yesterday we received our first election leaflet.

Note to candidates: there are better ways to persuade me to vote for you than to boast about having done things I'd rather you hadn't.

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Copyright © 2024 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).