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The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.

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8:52am on Thursday, 4th September, 2025:

Domain Summit

Anecdote

I was in London yesterday, to give a presentation at the Domain Summit. It was actually only half a presentation, the other half being by Nigel Roberts, an old university friend who actually knows about domain names (he operates the .gg country code).

The conference was held at the Business Design Centre in Islington.

That's not the Domain Summit, that's some textiles trade show that was on at the same time. The Domain Summit was in a room about the size of four tennis courts two floors up from this.

The audience was mainly comprised of what are now called "domainers": people who buy domain names to sell to people who want to use them. In the past, these unnecessary middlemen (they're almost all men) used to be called "cybersquatters", but that's now a term reserved for people even the domainers don't like.

Anyway, I know nothing about domain name sales, so gave my presentation about names in games. You can read it at https://mud.co.uk/richard/DomainSummit.pdf if you want to learn how little about that subject I know, too.

After the talk, I was accosted by a Ukrainian man who wanted to show everyone a photo of a croissant with ice cream on top of it, called the Boris Johnson.

Ah, I do miss speaking at conferences.

9:30am on Wednesday, 3rd September, 2025:

Spiders

Weird

8:42am on Tuesday, 2nd September, 2025:

Art Styles

Anecdote

I thought I'd uploaded this already, but it seems I haven't.

When I gave my speech at my elder daughter's wedding, that wasn't the only slideshow I made. I also created one to run in the background while everyone was eating. It began with a photograph of the happy couple taken in Florence, then followed this with the same photo rendered in different styles by AI.

Here it is in .pdf format.

You probably won't need the labels to tell you what most of the art styles are.

I've removed the original photograph, so you (or your friendly local AI) can have the pleasure of imagining what it looked like.

8:44am on Monday, 1st September, 2025:

Rainbow

Anecdote

My phone's camera doesn't do justice to how intense this rainbow was on Friday evening.

It was a double rainbow that arced unbroken across the sky. I guess that means there were two crocks of gold at each end.

The space between the bows looks distinct from that either side of them. This is how you get ancient peoples believing there's a rainbow bridging our world and another.

OK, so this rainbow was intense, but it wasn't on fire. Still, I'm sure that's a minor detail that can be worked around for those who want to pass between Midgard and Asgard.

8:27am on Sunday, 31st August, 2025:

More Conan

Weird

9:46am on Saturday, 30th August, 2025:

Saved

Weird

From this week's Essex County Standard:

Headlines don't say "local newspaper" much more clearly than that.

9:13am on Friday, 29th August, 2025:

Micropedia

Anecdote

I'm sending these books to the local charity book fair.

They're great little books! They're informative, packed with information and pictures, and are very helpful reference works. However, I've barely looked at them since I bought them, because they were published in 2000. Wikipedia started up in 2001.

Thirty years ago, whenever I needed to know something, I would buy a book that contained the information. My reasoning was that if at some future date I needed to know something else, I could well have a book in my collection that told me. However, once all the information was available on the Internet, there seemed little point in continuing this practice.

It's a shame, because those books really are nice little overviews, presenting the established facts in a non-technical manner while not talking down to the reader. They're organised, so you get the bigger picture to contextualise the basic information. They're the kind that you might peruse from a relative's bookshelf while everyone else is engaged in conversation about babies, pets or local gossip. Also, they use British English spelling. Wikipedia put paid to their like.

Nowadays, I don't even need to read Wikipedia. I just ask ChatGPT what foreign embassies were in Marylebone in 1873, it toddles off and tells me none, I ask where the Ottoman Empire's embassy was in 1873, it says Marylebone, I point out the contradiction, then it goes off thinking for a minute and tells me there was a Swedish legation in Marylebone in 1907, but probably not 1873. Source: Wikipedia. Wikipedia's source: some web site in Swedish.

Oh well. Plato wrote a dialogue in which Socrates offers that writing is OK as a reminder, but people ought to rely on their memories. Every forward step has someone who regrets it.

8:41am on Thursday, 28th August, 2025:

Designing Virtual Worlds, Second Edition, Volume I

Comment

So, I rewrote my 2003 book, Designing Virtual Worlds, from scratch. It started to get so big that it needed to be split into more than one volume. The first of these, which I spent maany months writing and a few more months indexing and making conform to Routledge's editorial standards, was completed in early June.

Today, I wondered whether there was a publication date, so I checked the Routledge site.

Yes, there was one: 8th August 2025.

It's been out for almost three weeks and I've seen no mention of it anywhere, let alone received a copy myself. I doubt any copies have been bought, either.

I'm perfectly capable myself of publishing books with no accompanying publicity; I don't need a professional publisher to do that for me.

9:56am on Wednesday, 27th August, 2025:

Attachments

Anecdote

As a lecturer, I wrote many references for students; I have over 170 of them saved in a directory on my hard drive.

As a former lecturer, I still receive occasional requests for references. I got one yesterday. It didn't take a lot of work to fill in (it was largely a form-filling exercise) so I did it there and then and attached the resulting .docx to the return email reply as directed.

It was just as I was about to hit send when I noticed that I had not, in fact, attached the reference .docx to the return email. I had attached the other .docx on my desktop to it instead. This file contained a number of poems by my daughter describing in vivid terms the behaviour of my 2-month-old grandson.

Maybe I should have sent it anyway. I'm sure that most of these references aren't read — and when they are, it's by an AI.

8:44am on Tuesday, 26th August, 2025:

For the Blood is the Life

Weird

From the St Pancras Guardian and Camden and Kentish Towns Reporter, 26 July 1875:

Either medical knowledge has deteriorated since then or the laws around advertising have been strengthened.

8:28am on Monday, 25th August, 2025:

Blackberries

Anecdote

Here are around a sixth of the blackberries my wife has picked so far this year from our garden. There's still another bowl's worth out there ripening.

Fortunately, we both really, really like blackberries, if not the rest of the plant.

8:43am on Sunday, 24th August, 2025:

Gelding Stiffen Melville

Anecdote

I tried out ChatGPT on three cryptic crossword clues that I'd had trouble with myself.

Here's the first:

Me: Here is a cryptic crossword clue for a 7-letter word beginning and ending with G, going across: "Get along and chime with hack who's had snip". Can you solve it? ChatGPT: GELDING Wordplay: "Get along" = GEL (as in "we gel"), and "chime" = DING. Put together: GEL + DING. Definition: "hack who's had snip" = a GELDING (a castrated horse). Fits pattern: 7 letters, starts and ends with G.

OK, well that's good. It did it very quickly — in four or five seconds. I'd been thinking of "hack" as being a journalist, so this one had taken me ages.

Here's the second:

Me: Here is a cryptic crossword clue for a 7-letter word beginning with S, going down: "Is at home climbing above swamp to find more solidity". Can you solve it? ChatGPT: Thought for 58s STIFFEN Definition: "to find more solidity." Wordplay: S ("is") + T ("to") + IN ("at home") climbing (reversed in a down clue → I) placed above FEN ("swamp") → S + T + I + FEN, with the F from "find" (initial letter) giving STIFFEN.

It got the right answer, but didn't notice that STIF is FITS (that is, "Is at home") when read backwards (because it's "climbing"). It concocted a weird set of justifications for it instead. To be fair, it was the "fits" part that took me awhile to work out, too.

Here's the third:

Me: Here is a cryptic crossword clue for an 8-letter word beginning with M, going down: "King mostly captivated by young French female novelist". Can you solve it? ChatGPT: Thought for 1m 22s MELVILLE "King mostly" = ELVI (Elvis, "the King," mostly = drop the final s). "young French female" = MLLE (abbr. for mademoiselle). "captivated by" indicates insertion: M(ELVI)LLE → MELVILLE. Definition: "novelist."

That's exactly right. I'd been thinking "Michelle" as being the name of a novellist, but couldn't get beyond the "elle" at the end until I investigated "King" meaning "Elvis" (which I'd thought the moment I read the clue, but had dismissed).

However, when I asked ChatGPT to solve this clue yesterday, it reasoned completely differently and got it wrong:

ChatGPT: Thought for 1m 18s MORRISON Definition: female novelist → (Toni) Morrison. Wordplay: M + (ROI) (French for "king") inside SON ("young" male) → M + S(ROI)ON → MORRISON.

In conclusion, then, if you're stuck on a cryptic crossword clue then ChatGPT is surprisingly good at them, but (as always with ChatGPT) you need to check what it produces because it's not always right.

10:26am on Saturday, 23rd August, 2025:

Bows and Arrows

Weird

I've been playing Expeditions Rome recently. It's one of those strategy games in which you lead a legion but still go off on six-person missions. Anyway, it has loading screens when you leavee the strategy map and enter camp. Here are the figures from two of them:

Neither of them seems to know how to hold a bow and arrow. No wonder the Romans conquered them.

8:50am on Friday, 22nd August, 2025:

Bells

Weird

There's a level crossing in Colchester with a string of bells over the road before it.

I think the idea is that if you're driving a tall vehicle and you hit the bells, that tells you you'd hit the overhead power lines the trains use if you were to proceed. I could be wrong, though, as I've never seen these anywhere else (or maybe I have but didn't notice them).

I don't suppose the sound of a few bells ringing would stop a driver from proceeding to take out the power for the Colchester to Clacton branch line, given that only yesterday a bus driver managed to hit a bridge in Chelmsford that even I knew was low, but they're a quaint feature anyway.

I wonder if they ring in strong winds and annoy the locals. I think the clappers are still in them.

12:00pm on Thursday, 21st August, 2025:

A Frozen Treat

Weird

I didn't know that dog ice cream is a thing until I saw these signs:

I wonder what flavours they do.

Well, I checked the web site for the Saffron Ice Cream Company, and it turns out there are two flavours: strawberry, apple and sweet potato; broccoli, carrot and blueberry.

So that's ice cream for vegetarian dogs then.

Damn, I was hoping for meat flavour. I might have gone for some bacon ice cream myself, even though I'm not a dog.

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Copyright © 2025 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).