I don't expect every member of the general population to keep up with recent leading news stories, but I do expect even local newspapers to have some awareness of them.
The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.
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8:16am on Saturday, 22nd August, 2026:
Weird
Oh dear, Essex County Standard. Oh dear, oh dear.
I don't expect every member of the general population to keep up with recent leading news stories, but I do expect even local newspapers to have some awareness of them.
7:40am on Friday, 21st August, 2026:
Outburst
People who manufacture paint-by-numbers sets would make it a lot easier for their customers if they printed the numbers in the colour of the matching paint. This would stop them from showing through, which otherwise always happens for pale colours. Whatever colour the canvas is can be left blank.
This is such a simple solution that I can't imagine it's not already being done by some enterprising paint-by-numbers company. Some have probably been doing it for fifty years. It is not, however, being done by the company that printed the paint-by-numbers picture I'm currently doing, even though they put some thin blues on the canvas to indicate shading.
I might be happier if my picture actually had some blues in it.
8:37am on Thursday, 20th August, 2026:
Weird
Our local Co-op sells milk in three sizes: 1 pint (568ml), 2 pints (1136ml) and 4 pints (2273ml).
1 pint costs £1.
2 pints cost £1.49
4 pints cost £1.95
As a rough estimate, then P pints of milk costs £(1+0.5*log2(P)).
If you want 3 pints, it's cheaper to buy 4. I don't know what the economics behind this is.
Looking into the farmers' costs, a typical UK dairy farm produces maybe 5,500 pints of milk a day, which if this formula appplied would bring in a mere £7.21. Fortunately, the formula doesn't apply: the actual amount farmers receive per pint fluctuates, but is about £0.20; they therefore receive around £1,100 for 5,500 pints. A supermarket selling 5,500 pints at £2 for 4 pints would take in £2,750, but there's transportation costs and the like so that doesn't mean they're making £1,650 more than the farmers. They do profit rather more for single pints, though.
I surreptitiously took these photos as evidence of the Co-op's pricing. That, not my poor camera skills, explains why they look so bad.
My poor camera skills would have made them look bad anyway, of course.
9:18am on Wednesday, 19th August, 2026:
Anecdote
Stars Reach went into early access yesterday.
I backed this on Kickstarter when it was announced, so have been able to play it (maybe "playtest" would be a better word) for the past few weeks. It's an MMORPG with amazing potential, some of which has already been realised. Its physics is far beyond anything you'll see in any other virtual world. It does have actual gameplay, though, plus building, crafting and gardening. There's a skills cap (which unfortunately I've exceeded by four), so you can't do everything yourself; an economy is therefore waiting to happen, once players have acquired enough money from doing missions that they have some to spare.
Building uses both blocks and panels, which can be freely mixed together. Components are put together from materials extracted from the environment. These have different properties on different planets, so the iron on one planet may be objectively better than that on another. Although plants regrow, minerals don't, so there are two comppeting pressures at work: stay where you are because it has a wide variety of great plants but is mined-out; move to another planet where there's more, possibly different minerals, but the plants might be inferior. The game's message is one of the responsible husbanding of resources. This threads right the way through it; ignoring it is why I have more skills than I'm allowed (although to be fair, it would have helped if I'd known there was a cap before I took them).
Overall, Stars Reach is definitely early-access quality rather than the finished article, but it's still a blast, and there's much, much more to come.
Only after I'd constructed it did I realise that my house looked like a half-submerged TARDIS.
I've since put a blue light on top.
8:35am on Tuesday, 18th August, 2026:
Weird
These Danish chocolate-covered banana mallows aren't really selling themselves to English-speaking monoglots.
I wasn't going to buy them anyway, because I don't like dark chocolate.
8:41am on Monday, 17th August, 2026:
Anecdote
We got this driving toy for our grandson to play with in the back of the car.
The layout is that of an automatic transmission vehicle in the pre-digital age, and it calls petrol "gas" so is from North America. If it were from the UK, it would have an ejector seat button and something for forward-pointing machine guns and rocket launchers.
My main complaint about it is that the steering wheel doesn't line up with the road. You turn the wheel and the road turns, but the starting position is to be turning left. This is not how it's supposed to be, according to the picture on the box. No matter how many times you rotate the wheel, it never lines up properly. I can't dismantle it to fix it, because it's a toy for younsgters and uses special screws that can't be unscrewed
None of this makes any difference to our grandson. It accomplishes it task of staving off in-car boredom for something like five or ten minutes, so we count its purchase as a success.
8:26am on Sunday, 16th August, 2026:
Weird
Seen on a public bench in Colchester:
I didn't know him, and to be honest, I'm quite relieved.
8:45am on Saturday, 15th August, 2026:
Anecdote
Yesterday, I received an emergency message from the government on my phone. So did everyone else who had a phone that was switched on. I actually received two (three hours apart). Some people received three.
I have a couple of points to make about this.
Firstly, telling us that there's a risk of fires and we shouldn't use portable barbecues or fireworks is not an emergency. Pretty well everyone already knew of the fire risks in these drought conditions anyway. When my phone started with the alarm yesterday, I thought there was an actual emergency, maybe a fire bearing down on our house or a missile heading for Colchester. I didn't expect it to be a message reminding terrorists of a simple way to cause havoc.
Secondly, the message itself needs a way to turn the sound off. There were people (my wife included) who closed the pop-up without reading beyond the first line because the alarm was so aggravating. Maybe there is such a way to quieten it. Maybe touching the message anywhere except the "OK" button stops the racket. If so, it's ineffective unless you tell people it exists.
If our new PM, Andy Burnham, thinks that acting on his earlier "tinderbox" comment by sending everyone with a phone a message telling them what they already knew would make the slightest difference either to the preponderance of wildfires or to his reputation as being decisive, he's mistaken. The message just came across as patronising.
8:22am on Saturday, 15th August, 2026:
Miscellaneous
I like the way that Google street view blurs out the faces of the figures on the Sri Mariamman Temple in Singapore.
Doing this preserves the modesty of major Hindu deities.
7:18am on Friday, 14th August, 2026:
Anecdote
Well here's a cheap-shot marketing ploy to draw attention to your local estate agency.
I don't know what it is about their business that they can claim is naked in some metaphorical sense. I'm rather hoping it's not a literal sense, though.
8:22am on Thursday, 13th August, 2026:
Anecdote
We saw the partial solar eclipse yesterday. It was OK, but nowhere near as good as a full eclipse.
No pictures, because everyone else will be posting theirs and mine didn't come out.
Although there was a nationwide shortage of glasses you can use to look at the sun, we'd kept ours from the full eclipse in 1999, so were sorted. Ha! Take that, anti-hoarders!
There's another partial eclipse in Colchester next year, but only covering about half the sun, It'll be barely noticeable.
I''ll keep the glasses until the next full eclipse in this neck of the woods, but it's on 14th June, 2151, by which time the lenses may have perished. I could have to buy a new pair.
8:38am on Wednesday, 12th August, 2026:
Anecdote
This is the entirety of our greengage crop this year.
My wife is pleased because it's a 300% increase on our crop last year.
8:21am on Tuesday, 11th August, 2026:
Anecdote
I was recently interviewed about virtual worlds, the result of which has now been published at https://80.lv/articles/richard-bartle-mmo-monetization-virtual-worlds-players-express-themselves.
From the URL, you can perhaps divine what the focus the interview ended up being. It was recorded, and then written up; the written-up version is what was publisheed.
I have to say, I come across as much more incisive and authoratative when my words are edited such that they form complete, non-rambling sentences.
8:21am on Monday, 10th August, 2026:
Weird
Steam does put some bizarre games in my discovery queue.
Maybe the recommendation algorithm displayed it to everyone called Richard.
8:26am on Sunday, 9th August, 2026:
Anecdote
My pharmacist daughter was recently trained to take blood tests.
So far, she's done nineteen of them. Seventeen of them were on men with tattooed arms.
Pro tip: if you're going to get a tattoo and expect to have a blood test at some stage in your life, you might want to consider keeping the inside of your most veiny elbow clear. You're OK if you have a continuous monchrome band, because that's little different to someone who has naturally dark skin. However, it's hard to see veins through layers of patterned, coloured ink.
All of the tattooed men wanted blood tests for the same reason, but I can't say what it was for patient-confidentiality reasons (that is, my daughter wouldn't tell me).
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Copyright © 2026 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).