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The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.

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7:39am on Thursday, 3rd October, 2024:

Updates

Anecdote

I don't have any teaching this term, so am currently going through all my lecture slides updating them for next term. I do this every year, having made notes the during previous year of any changes I need to make.

Some of the changes are trivial (FIFA <year> is now EA Sports FC <year>), some involve a little extra work (checking that all the links to web sites still work and finding alternatives for those that don't) and some involve new slides, typically to cover problems students had in the exams (thinking a positive feedback loop concerns the feedback they get from their assignments, or thinking that tokens are casino money, or thinking that puzzles are specifically jigsaw puzzles).

I also remove slides. New slides accumulate over the years, and many of my lectures are now at risk of overrunning. This year, I'm being especially ruthless: interesting material I added during the pandemic when my classes weren't face-to-face (and so involved no practical work) is now in my sights. Much as I'd like to give my students a 20-slide grounding in the predicate calculus, I probably don't have to do so.

One of the changes I'm making this year is structural, forced on me by the fact that for my second-year module the classes precede the lectures. Normally, I'd give a lecture then cover the material practically in the following class; this time, thanks to the way that timetabling has panned out, classes come first with the lecture the following day. This kind of thing does happen occasionally, but I can't look back for the previous solution because the module has been updated since then.

Hmm. The class is timetabled for Mondays 11:00-13:00 in a room with flat tables (so the students can play games on them). The lecture is timetabled for Tuesdays 16:00-18:00. By coincidence, it's also in a room with flat tables. I could, therefore, teach the lectures in the class slot and the classes in the lecture slot. There's a fighting chance that students might come to an 11:00 lecture, rather than a 16:00 one.

Maybe I'll ask the timetabling office to switch the class/lecture order, then switch it anyway if they refuse.



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10:45am on Wednesday, 2nd October, 2024:

Wants

Weird

This "household wants indicator"" was in a museum we visited in Bristol (photo taken through glass, hence the odd reflections).



I don't know from when it dates, but Vim scouring powder came out in 1904 so it's after then. These things come up for auction, probably because there's on in the Downton Abbey kitchen, and the consensus among auctioneers is that they date from the 1920s.

Personally, I'd have glued the indicate for "game"" so it was permanently set, although it probably doesn't mean the kind of game that I do.



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10:19am on Tuesday, 1st October, 2024:

Random Numbers

Anecdote

Whenever I log into my university account, I'm sent a two-factor authentication code via a "user verification" service operated by Microsoft. This consists of six digits.

Here are the last 20 codes I've received:
191936 440310 707908 800661 161320 940405 123471 543113 987490 870678 389849 129773 524582 987348 523498 268559 264995 167802 858352 691768.

Seven of these have three consecutive digits that count up or down:
123471 987490 870678 543113 987348 523498 167802.

Two of the remainder have a two-digit number pair repeated:
191936 940405.

Four of the remainder have a triple with the first and third digits the same:
707908 161320 389849 858352.

Five of the remainder have one or more digits doubled:
440310 800661 129773 268559 264995.

The two that don't fit any of these categories are:
524582 691768.

Let's try this again with 20 numbers generated by a simple pseudo-random-number generator (Mulberry32):
556585 056448 466112 335155 488736 207921 735581 883008 452570 604694 430747 353811 661339 864954 350834 107551 568956 540669 711693 937602.

None of them have three consecutive digits that count up or down.

One has a two-digit number pair repeated:
466112.

Five of the remainder have a triple with the first and third digits the same:
556585 335155 452570 430747 353811.

Eight of the remainder have one or more digits doubled:
056448 488736 735581 883008 661339 107551 540669 711693.

The six that don't fit any of these categories are:
207921 604694 864954 350834 568956 937602.

From this exercise, I conclude that the numbers despatched by Microsoft's user verification service have been biased so as to be easy to remember, in order that people can hold them in their heads between reading them on their phone and typing them into their browser.

As a quick check, there are a million possible six-digit numbers and 16 sequences of three-digit numbers going either up or down. If a sequence starts at the first digit of the six, there are a thousand numbers that can follow it: therefore, there are 16,000 sequences that start at the first of the six digits. If a sequence starts at the second digit there are a hundred numbers that can follow it but ten that can precede it, so that's still 16,000 sequences. It's a similar thing for sequences that start at digits 3 and 4, leading to an upper bound of 64,000 six-digit numbers that have a three-digit sequence that ascends or descends. The reason it's an upper bound is that some of the numbers are counted twice (123456 would be counted four times, for example). The actual count of six-digit numbers having at least one sequence of three digits that are consecutive integers going either up or down is 59,262 (I wrote a program).

So 59262/100000, or just under 6% of all six-digit numbers meet the criteria. The chance of getting 7 of these out of 20 involves some nasty messing about with factorials, but according to ChatGPT it's just under 0.009%. The chance of getting 20 numbers that contain no such sequences is easier to calculate, and is just under 30%.

Yeah, Microsoft is definitely fixing those numbers.



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10:08am on Monday, 30th September, 2024:

So it Begins

Anecdote





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4:09pm on Sunday, 29th September, 2024:

Vase of Monroe

Weird

My elder daughter's spouse-to-be picked this up at an AI conference recently.



It's a jigsaw puzzle. The image on the left is of vases of flowers; the image on the right is of Marilyn Monroe.

OK, so even knowing that the image on the left is of vases of flowers, I find it something of an effort to see the vases of flowers there. I can see MM easily enough, though.

The thing is, these puzzles use the same pieces. The diffusion algorithm created them so they could be reassembled in two different ways. This is obviously early days, but if improvements are made as rapidly as they were for single images, the result could be very impressive. There probably aren't many commercial applications for jigaw puzzles, but I'm sure other uses are out there awaiting discovery.

Naturally, I paid for this information by giving everyone in my daughter's household a cold.



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8:44am on Saturday, 28th September, 2024:

Cold

Anecdote

Ugh, I have a cold.

It's not COVID-19 (I did a test), but my colds are usually very bad and this one is not an exception. I noticed it coming on when I was in London on Friday evening, so I bought some tissues. The Sainsbury's opposite Harrod's had them quite cheap: £1.25 for a pack of ten, or £1.30 for a pack of two with a balsam infusion. I didn't really want the balsam version, but I bought them anyway because I'd have had to have binned eight of the ten packets, not having enough room in my pockets and not wanting to walk around with them in my hands.

I'm currently in Bristol, where we're visiting our daughter and her spouse-to-be. Normally, when my nose starts to run and I need a new tissue every ten or fifteen minutes, I take an Actifed to stop it. Unfortunately, as I was driving for four hours, I couldn't take one (they can cause drowsiness, as can the M4). As a consequence, I have a sore nose and upper lip — a classic combinaation for me when I have a cold and no Actifed. I look as if I've been hit with a brick.

Other than the respiratory problems that come with a cold, I have none of the other effects that are normally associated with them. This is always the case for me. No tiredness, no aches and pains, no headaches: just a nose that seems able to produce more liquid than I drink.

I'm low on tissues, though. I'm beginning to wish I had bought the ten-pack on Thursday.



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12:10am on Friday, 27th September, 2024:

Remarkable

Anecdote

I was invited by the Norwegian Embassy to watch a private screening in London yesterday eveing of the film The Remarkable Life of Ibelin, so I went along.



It's a remarkable film. It's about a young Norwegian man, Mats Steen, who had a degenerative musculature disease and died aged 25. His parents were frustrated that his illness had meant he could never make friends, never find love and never have an impact on the world. They were therefore astonished when, upon his death, it transpired he'd done all these things in the 20,000 hours he'd spent in World of Warcraft. It's a very touching film, mixing archive footage, interviews and in-WoW footage (about equal parts each); lots of people in the audience were crying at the end — not through sadness, but through happiness for him. The film has been shown in cinemas in Norway, will soon be on Netflix and is probably going to be shortlisted for an oscar.

I was the only games person there, meaning I'd spent 6,000 hours in WoW more than anyone else. I got to speak to the Norwegian Deputy Ambassador, along with the wife of the actual Ambassador. I got to speak to film directors. I got to speak to the woman who decides whether people who apply for UK honours for overseas people get one or not; she later lost her phone and had to borrow mine to try to find it by calling it, then borrow it again to use as a torch to find it. (Hmm, that means I have her phone number. Luckily, I'm not corrupt, and neither is she).

I also spoke to the director of the film, Benjamin Ree. I told him that creating a world as a place where people could go to be who they are, and find out who they are if they didn't yet know, was exactly what Roy and I were doing with MUD. I asked him if he had wanted to interview players but they'd turned him down because they didn't want to appear on screen. He said yes, this had indeed happened. That's actually good, in my view; it means the magic still works.

The most perceptive person I heard speak was the father of Mats, Robert Steen. He was very eloquent and insightful. He said he and his wife, Trude (who was also there) had lived with their son under the same roof for 25 years and yet there was so much they didn't know about him, and they questioned how this could be. He then extrapolated this to everyone else: you can live with someone for decades, but people really live in their heads and you never know what's going on in there unless they tell you. I'd have liked to have had a chat with him, but so did everyone else and I had a train to catch.

There's a memorial to Mats Steen, or Ibelin, as his character is known, in World of Warcraft. Every year, on the anniversary of his death, his former guild mates meet up there. After the release of this film, they may not be alone there.

Strangely, none of the people I spoke to had heard of Who Killed Miss Norway, a similar story with a somewhat different denouement.



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8:07am on Thursday, 26th September, 2024:

Retitled Paintings #28

Weird





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2:42pm on Wednesday, 25th September, 2024:

Clinical

Anecdote

I had to go to the local hospital today for a pre-operation clinic appointment (I'm having my navel hernia fixed next month). The appointment only took 15 minutes, but the pre-clinic form I had to fill in yesterday evening took half an hour.

One of the questions I was asked was whether I would be travelling for 3 hours or more without a break within three weeks of the operation. I think it's something to do with their not wanting me to have any large blood clots, such as those from deep vein thrombosis. The question somewhat alarmed me because I'm travelling to Malaga and back the week before my operation.

I checked the flight times: 2 hours 55 minutes.

That's convenient.

OK, so I suspect the reason for a flight time of 2 hours 55 minutes is that flights of 3 hours or more are considered medium haul, so Ryanair would have to pay more compensation in the event of a delay or cancellation. Still, so long as I don't actually get deep vein thrombosis in the wide, comfortable Ryanair seats with their generous leg-room, I don't care.



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8:36am on Tuesday, 24th September, 2024:

Freak Hutch Ready

Weird

Today's solution for my Plaitword puzzle is an eerie reminder that the new academic year starts next week.



Hmm, that's going to spoil it for anyone who was planning to do the puzzle today but hasn't. Fortunately, that's the empty set, so I've no need to worry.



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8:30am on Monday, 23rd September, 2024:

Shreds

Anecdote

Whenever I have any official pieces of paper that look as if I might need to keep them, I put them in a box. When the box gets full, I keep putting them in the box until it's so full that it won't fit on the shelf. Then, after piling a few up on my desk, I eventually get around to going through the papers, to see which ones I no longer need to keep. I shred the papers I no longer need if they have my name or address on them. Otherwise, they go in the recycling bin as they are. This takes me an entire morning and is why I don't like doing it.

Yesterday, I did it. It turned out that I no longer needed to keep quite a lot of them.



This is the cue for the Inland Revenue to ask me to explain a £32.50 purchase I made on 25th July 2015.



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9:10am on Sunday, 22nd September, 2024:

Retitled Paintings #27

Weird





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9:20am on Saturday, 21st September, 2024:

Bhéwonom Paperback

Miscellaneous

Bhéwonom, the third and final book in my Matters Dheghōm series, is finally in print. You can get it from https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1915964067, although if I want to see it in bookshops then I suppose I should register it with a distributor.

If you're one of the people mentioned in the acknowledgements, you won't need to buy a copy because I'll send you one. That means: Alexandros Katsiamakas, Raph Koster, Jenny Bartle, Dan Gomme, Jon Leonard, Jacob Cord, David Chester and Viktor Toth. I think I have addresses for you all. I don't suppose that anyone not mentioned either read the book or had any interest in doing so anyway, so no-one will be worried that their name doesn't appear.

If you're wondering why it takes so long to get from "finished" to "published", it's because when the text is finished I format it and send it to Amazon KDP for publishing. I request an inspection copy, which I receive after about a week, then I read it when I get a chance (normally at a weekend). I find that it's full of things I want to change, so make revisions and repeat the process. Five inspection copies later, the changes are few enough that I risk releasing it for publication. Five is the same number I needed both for Dheghōm and Erwā, so must mark the point when my patience runs out for this kind of work.

Right, an announcement: I hereby formally make the paracosm defined by these books open source. The books themselves aren't, but the world they describe is. The books are canon; anything you do with their fiction can add to the canon for your own fork of said fiction, but it won't be canon for the forks of other people. To help with this, I've started work on a reference book, provisionally called The Dheghōm Cosmogony, but it's slow going so don't wait for it to appear if you like the trilogy's high concept and want to have a bash yourself — it's quicker just to ask me if you have any queries.

By the way, fictionally the spellings "Dheghōm", Erwā and "Bhéwonom" represent how the language we call Proto Indo-European was actually spoken back in the day. This isn't quite how modern scholars think it was pronounced, but it's close. They don't always agree with each other, but in the International Phonetic Alphabet the way the fiction's "dheghōm"" is usually written is something like "*dhhom". You can hear how this was pronounced here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FD2yPqODlBA&t=168s. It's riveting stuff.

Hmm. Maybe I should get back to Lizzie Lott #5 now.



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11:20am on Friday, 20th September, 2024:

Fallout 76

Anecdote

I've been playing Fallout 76 of late, and after 234 hours have reached the point at which it seems right to quit.

As soon as I entered, I was reminded of Elder Scrolls Online and other Bethesda games. It has the same compass ribbon approach and no mini-map, and the lock-picking mini-game hasn't really changed since Morrowind. Worse, it has the same dynamic difficulty-adjustment system that makes all progress pointless. Still, this didn't come as a surprise so I can't complain.

Levelling-up involves allocating points to attributes and choosing "perks", which are basically skills. Beyond level 50, you don't get the attribute points, just the perks, which you can configure in various loadouts. Weirdly, these loadouts allow changes to attribute values. It makes no sense to say that someone is stronger and less intelligent when they're questing than they are when they're crafting, but that's how these things work. Once you have a decent set of perks and have maxed them all out, you can scrap the ones you won't be using to obtain points that let you level up "legendary perks", few of which seem particularly useful.

There's no maximum level but, because level 50 is where the attributes-levelling stops, I figured I'd play until I was level 100. I actually stopped at 116, thanks to a double-XP weekend that came up immediately before some new content I wanted to try. I saw several characters with a level higher than 1,000; 1,326 was the maximum I spotted.

Because of the dynamic difficulty adjustment, if you level up in a fight then so do the mobs you're fighting. This isn't much of a problem at higher levels because the incremental change is small, but if you're level 12 and suddenly the mobs coming at you are level 13 and you haven't had a chance to increase an attribute and add a perk, you could be in trouble.

The new content is riddled with bugs. There are still bugs in older content, too. One quest asks me to find something in a locker in an area with no lockers. Another asks me to speak to a person in a four-area zone (Atlantic City) that I can't visit except when running it as an instance, in which case the person I'm to meet isn't there. I didn't bother trying the other off-map zone (the Pitt), which perhaps I should have but I came to these late. The reason I came to them late is because having been told that I needed to speak to a flying-machine pilot to fly there, I figured I should speak to the flying-machine pilot to fly there. It turned out I needed to hit ESCAPE R to go there.

To quit the game, by the way, you have to hit ESCAPE Z then scroll down to the tiny "quit" at the bottom of the menu. That wasn't obvious; I had to look it up when I'd finished my first session and wanted to log off. When you restart, you don't restart where you logged off, either, you start nearby (where "nearby" means "oh, around there somewhere").

One of the features of the Fallout universe is you get to wear powered armour. Most players do kit their characters out in this. I didn't. The reason I didn't is that it was too heavy to lug around. For the first maybe 75 levels, until I got the right perks (which are distributed randomly), I was perpetually over-encumbered and couldn't fast-travel anywhere. It transpired that the reason for this is Fallout 1st. OK, so normally when I start a new MMO that has a subscription model, I take out a subscription. Fallout 76 has one, which is calls Fallout 1st. Unfortunately, it doesn't make this at all clear. I looked to see how to subscribe, didn't see the word "subscribe" anywhere, so figured it didn't have a subscription. Fallout 1st seemed to be some kind of pay-to-win package of goodies you could buy as a one-off. By the time I realised that no, it was the subscription, I knew I wasn't going to be playing for a great deal longer so I didn't take it up. Anyway, if I did have the subscription then I could have had an infinitely-large store for all my crafting components (known in the game as "junk"), meaning that I could keep all the heavy stuff in my regular storage box. Without Fallout 1st, I was limited in what I could keep, and that didn't include power armour. I only noticed that Fallout 1st was a subscription when I tried to buy it from the game store with all the secondary currency ("atoms") I'd picked up from inadvertently completing challenges during play. I expect my experience would have been somewhat different if I'd been wearing power armour against some of the solo-instance bosses, instead of sniping them at distance, running out of range of their two-shots-kill weapons and jabbing myself with a stimpack every thirty seconds.

Each instantiation of the virtual world only holds 24 players, which is quite cosy and reminded me of the early days of MUDs. I could have made some friends there, were it not for the fact that there's no communication whatsoever except through emotes. Worlds that small don't need guilds, but they do need communication. Also, although I was asked to join a group many times (which increases XP gain even if you're doing separate things), I never found out how to accept the offer. Clicking on it opened up some kind of clunky friends interface. I guess I could have looked it up, but that isn't really the point. If you want people to group together and for communities to form, you make it blindingly obvious, not "whoah, what the hell is this?".

The stories associated with quests are pretty good. They would be better if they didn't take so long to complete that it's hard to remember what the point was. Some of them were of the tiresome "prove your worth" or "earn our trust" variety, but on the whole they were well thought-out. The main story quest ends just after you launch a nuke, or at least it's supposed to. I launched the nuke, but hadn't previously visited a location that I needed to have visited so as to open up the final scene. Trying to discover where this was could have been easier (there were 18 locations to visit and I'd only visited 17, but I didn't know which one I was missing); it rather took the edge off the feeling of success. Quest markers in instances are often missing, except for one on the exit indicating where to go for the next quest that you're not doing.

Oh, and having a cut-scene conversation as part of a quest and being attacked by mobs while having that conversation really ought not to happen.

The world-building is good. It reminded me of The Secret World (although TSW's is better). Mountains are largely comprised of stone slabs just slightly too high to jump onto unless you have some kind of rocket boost on your power armour. I did like being able to jump down safely from tall cliffs by landing on slightly-sticking-out slabs, though. Parts of the world have noxious gases, so player characters have to wear a face covering to visit them. As a result, you never see another character's face, it's always hidden under a visor or a gas mask or something. This is not a good idea if you want players to identify with their characters.

There aren't many different kinds of mobs. Some, such as supermutants all look the same except for their weapons and armour. In solo instances, there are never-ending swarms of mobs at the start that you can kill indefinitely, they're continually replaced; it's easy XP, if you want easy XP.

Fallout 76 does have housing which it calls C.A.M.P.s (a forced acronym for "Construction and Assembly Mobile Platform"), and because it's a small world they're out in the open: anyone can visit them. I quite liked this idea. You can fast-travel to them for free (if not over-encumbered) so they're very handy for that if nothing else. You can set up crafting stations there and grow food, and set up an ally who'll give you an easy quest every two days. There were three issues I had with them, though:
1) Some C.A.M.P.s were flagged as having goods to sell, but actually finding what object counted as the vendor was often something of a trial.
2) C.A.M.P.s don't persist when you log off, so if someone else builds one where yours goes then you have to set it up somewhere else instead. This happened to me when the game decided to place an award-winning show home from some other shard right where my camp was; I got around it by spending my free atoms on a second C.A.M.P. that I put close to my main one.
3) The owner of the C.A.M.P. is shown by account name, not character name. My account name was RichardBartle. This was bad for immersion reasons, but fortunately no-one knows who I am any more and communication was impossible anyway, so I didn't get any hassle from it.

There are some unique boosts in the game, namely magazines and bobble-head figures. As usual with unique boosts, I kept them for when they were really, really needed but never decided that one was indeed really, really needed. Maybe they're replenishable after you've used them, but I didn't ever try one to find out. I did try out some of the freebie group-gift boxes I received (you get a free something every day you log in), which had some effect on me and those around me. Sometimes, several people opened theirs at once, which used to happen in The Secret World. Unfortunately, unlike with TSW, it was never quite clear what the effects were. Little cartoon animations appeared from time to time that seemed to be telling me something, but gawd knows what it was.

Despite the impression I may have given in writing all the above, I did quite enjoy Fallout 76. The world itself was well-conceived and the players were friendly if uncommunicative. I could have kept playing if I hadn't long run out of things to do. Dynamic difficulty-adjustment is its worst feature, but can be lived with if you accept it as a fact of life from the outset (which I did).

To round off, here's an obligatory screen shot of my character falling through the game's architecture.





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11:40am on Thursday, 19th September, 2024:

Oxford, Bristol, Essex

Weird

Here are the first three responses I got from Midjourney when I asked for (left to right) "an undergraduate of Oxford University", "an undergraduate of Bristol University" and "an undergraduate of Essex University".



I don't know what the big metal head is all about, but only one image has an undergraduate in it so at least they got the attendance number right.



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