Except, see that one on the right of the second-bottom row (Sansa)? When I use the toilet, she stares directly at me.
It's rather more unsettling than it ought to be.
The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.
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11:31am on Sunday, 12th January, 2025:
Anecdote
My wife has bought a display stand for the Game of Thrones characters she keeps in the downstairs toilet (the "throne room"). They look pretty good.
Except, see that one on the right of the second-bottom row (Sansa)? When I use the toilet, she stares directly at me.
It's rather more unsettling than it ought to be.
9:51am on Saturday, 11th January, 2025:
Anecdote
We went out for a meal last night. Before leaving, I thought I should have a shave so as to deceive the people in the restaurant into believing I wasn't a slob. Furthermore, I settled on having a wet shave, using a razor with blades and stuff, because having neglected to shave for a couple of days I felt my electric razor wasn't going to be up to the job. I started running the water in the bathroom so it would warm up.
At the time, I was wearing a new jumper I'd got for my birthday. Wishing neither to get it wet nor to wear it to the restaurant, I took it off.
I then tested the water with my finger to see if it was warm enough to use yet.
That's the first time in my life that I've ever suffered a static electric shock from running water.
8:00am on Friday, 10th January, 2025:
Anecdote
It's my birthday today. I'm 65. This sounds old, because it is.
65 used to be the retirement age for men in the UK. When I worked for private companies, they would enrol me in the company pension scheme under the not-unreasonable assumption that 65 would still be the retirement age when I reached 65. As a result, I have three of them that have been bugging me for months asking me what I want to do with my pension money when I reach 65. I've been ignoring them, on the grounds that I don't know what I want to do with my money yet. They'll therefore automatically keep hold of it and make investments with it until I actually do retire and tell them I want it now. This means that a stock exchange crash and rampant inflation are almost guaranteed before then.
Oh well, back to work.
7:44am on Thursday, 9th January, 2025:
Anecdote
Yesterday, I learned that if you're going to drop your coat on the floor indoors, a barber's is a bad place to do so.
I think I'll be able to get most of the hair off it with a vacuum cleaner.
7:45am on Wednesday, 8th January, 2025:
Weird
8:53am on Tuesday, 7th January, 2025:
Weird
Nice try, Tymperleys, but I'm still going to search for a secret door.
8:25am on Monday, 6th January, 2025:
Anecdote
Oh well, the Christmas break is over and it's time once more to confront the inescapable.
8:56am on Sunday, 5th January, 2025:
Anecdote
I broke two mugs yesterday within two hours of each other. On both occasions it was by accident, but the same thing happened: I caught them on the shelf they go on and they fell 20cm, landing on their handles. One of them I was getting out and the other I was putting away, but other than that it was the same story for each one.
As for why it happened, well I currently have a very bad cold and it might have affected my co-ordination. Both times, I was holding the mug in my left hand (which is a risk even when I'm at the peak of physical fitness), and my grip slipped when I caught them on the shelf.
I haven't tested myself for COVID-19 because I don't think that's what it is — it's just a bug that's going around. My younger daughter caught it (a lot of sick people go into pharmacies). She told me she felt the symptoms coming on when someone else described them to her; weirdly, as she was telling me this, I could feel the symptoms coming on myself. It was too quick to have picked it up off my daughter; I think I must have caught it from Colchester.
Despite being in close contact with both of us, my wife is unaffected. She almost always escapes colds. I think they're afraid of her.
9:53am on Saturday, 4th January, 2025:
Anecdote
Parked outside the local convenience shop yesterday was a Porche 911 Turbo S with the registration number ROB IT (well, ROB 1T, but it looked like ROB IT).
I don't know if this was an invitation or merely that the car belonged to someone called Rob who works in IT, although how an IT worker could afford a car that costs £168,900 is unclear.
I'd show you a photo, but I didn't have my phone with me at the time.
I'm convinced that not having a phone with me is a sure-fire way to see something interesting whenever I go for a walk.
10:39am on Friday, 3rd January, 2025:
Weird
On the one hand, I worry that online services know everything about me, and on the other hand Steam recommends this game to me:
Maybe they're trying to trick me into thinking they don't know everything about me.
10:40am on Thursday, 2nd January, 2025:
Anecdote
My wife decided that New Year's Day wasn't Christmas any longer, and took down our Christmas cards. She left the decorations up, as is traditional, but cards aren't decorations.
Every year, I take the cards and turn them into gift tags for next year's presents. I can't do it for all the cards: some have writing on the back of the pictures; some are home-made and I can't cut them; some are on too-thick card I can't round the corners of; some are photo cards of people I know; some don't have any images on them I'd want to use as a gift tag; some I want to keep. Most, however, are fair game. The best cards are ones I can make several tags from.
If you recognise your disassembled card among that lot, congratulations, it made the cut. It has been recycled as a gift tag, and next year will be despatched to the paper recycling bin as a used gift tag. Alternatively, I might not use it next year but will keep it and use it at a later year.
One of the side-effects of making cards into tags is that when I wrap the presents up before Christmas, I am reminded of what a previous year's cards looked like. This means that if you send me the same card twice in a row, I notice.
You have been warned.
10:09am on Wednesday, 1st January, 2025:
Anecdote
It's that time of year when I look at what blog posts were popular the previous year. This time round, I actually remembered to record the numbers for all the months, so can give a complete picture. Only the top 30 items on the site appear in the stats, and most of those are of meta-elements (RSS files, CSS files, .ico files, and the QBlog landing page, that kind of thing).
Anyway, here are the entries that made it to the top 30 each month, along with their topic and the number of hits they got:
335 My younger daughter's wedding. https://www.youhaventlived.com/qblog/2024/QBlog130124A.html
326 Moaning about no phone signal outside the M&S changing rooms. https://www.youhaventlived.com/qblog/2024/QBlog070124A.html
292 Saying I did a lot of work but it wasn't what I inteded to do. https://www.youhaventlived.com/qblog/2024/QBlog230224A.html
272 A mis-spelling of "quackers". https://www.youhaventlived.com/qblog/2024/QBlog020324A.html
352 Students' use of ChatGPT. https://www.youhaventlived.com/qblog/2024/QBlog260424A.html
332 A comment on reports of the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings. https://www.youhaventlived.com/qblog/2024/QBlog070624A.html
184 AI diffusion models of MUD1 room descriptions. https://www.youhaventlived.com/qblog/2024/QBlog070824A.html
202 A gripe about multi-choice questions. https://www.youhaventlived.com/qblog/2024/QBlog020924A.html
208 A long post about dreaming issues that turned out to be wrong. https://www.youhaventlived.com/qblog/2024/QBlog101124A.html
183 A photograph of a Colchester church with no hands on its clock. https://www.youhaventlived.com/qblog/2024/QBlog071124A.html
179 A piece on some books I bought at the local annual book fair. https://www.youhaventlived.com/qblog/2024/QBlog031124A.html
172 A post about childhood books. https://www.youhaventlived.com/qblog/2024/QBlog111124A.html
560 A photograph of a bauble bath. https://www.youhaventlived.com/qblog/2024/QBlog041224A.html
241 I bought some more antique playing cards. https://www.youhaventlived.com/qblog/2024/QBlog091224A.html
241 I bought some more playing cards. https://www.youhaventlived.com/qblog/2024/QBlog191224A.html
197 Computer Science versus the rest of the Universityhttps://www.youhaventlived.com/qblog/2024/QBlog011224A.html
196 An old poster on display in the university. https://www.youhaventlived.com/qblog/2024/QBlog101224A.html
187 The propensity of the BBC to state the obvious. https://www.youhaventlived.com/qblog/2024/QBlog031224A.html
Most of these are only one or two lines long, and there was something of an uptick in November and December compared to earlier months. I suspect that someone has started reposting some of the shorter ones in a private social media group, but I'm not complaining. At least someone is reading them!
A number of posts from previous years also featured, some of which are old friends:
413 Colchester road signs (from 2005). https://www.youhaventlived.com/qblog/2005/QBlog160705A.html
852 An ad in The Independent about eatring cancer (from 2007). https://www.youhaventlived.com/qblog/2007/QBlog210107A.html
2584 A short rant about the Great Limerick Craze (from 2007). https://www.youhaventlived.com/qblog/2007/QBlog100907A.html
180 My discussion of a World of Warcraft zone (from 2009). https://www.youhaventlived.com/qblog/2009/QBlog170509A.html
1799 The red-nosed clown joke (from 2010). https://www.youhaventlived.com/qblog/2010/QBlog030510A.html
4608 A random long-and-boring post about some playing cards I bought. https://www.youhaventlived.com/qblog/2013/QBlog250413A.html
The appearance of some of those is inexplicable.
Elsewhere on my web site, my player types paper gets about 8000 downloads a month and my book Designing Virtual Worlds gets about 4000. How to Be a God gets something like 700, which is still respectable but hasn't translated into citations (it has 3).
Outside of QBlog, 2024 was somewhat better than 2023. However, as you read Qblog (or you wouldn't be seeing this), you know that already.
Enjoy 2025!
10:01am on Tuesday, 31st December, 2024:
Weird
9:34am on Monday, 30th December, 2024:
Outburst
My wife and I have been watching Portrait Artist of the Year, which we record and watch on Sunday evenings. We missed a couple of Sundays, so were a few episodes behind. Thus, it was only yesterday that we watched the final (which was broadcast about three weeks ago).
Hmm.
In the first rounds of the series, we attempted to identify the artist whose work looked least like the sitter, assuming that this would be the eventual winner. We were duly proven correct. If I hadn't been told that the winning commission was a portrait of daytime TV broadcaster Lorraine Kelly, I would not have known that it was depicting daytime TV broadcaster Lorraine Kelly (and not because I don't know what daytime TV broadcaster Lorraine Kelly looks like).
Kelly herself liked it, and the curator of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery where it will be hung was complicit in the decision to choose the winning artist over a manifestly better one, but I'm left wondering what a portrait is supposed to be if it captures neither the look nor the soul of the sitter.
There's a decent analysis of the final episode, including a photo of the final commision, here. Its author is more forgiving than I am.
I think I'll still watch Portrait Artist of the Year 2025, but as a spoof of an arts programme rather than an arts programme.
9:30am on Sunday, 29th December, 2024:
Weird
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Copyright © 2025 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).