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The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.

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8:35am on Sunday, 20th April, 2025:

Paradox Museum

Anecdote

We went to the Paradox Museum in London yesterday, meeting up with my elder daughter and her fiancée. It's more of a museum of illustions than of paradoxes, but it was good all the same.

Here's one of the few pictures I took that didn't have a person in it:

Afterwards, we had lunch in some kind of vegan restaurant, which was good but expensive. It turns out that the vegan version of crème brûlée is actually just crème caramel with some hardened sugar on the top, but I like crème caramels so actually quite enjoyed it. It tasted like the ones my mum used to make, except without the layer of cigarette smoke infused at the bottom (that is, the top while they're being made upside-down).

I went home after that because the others were going to a musical, Mulan Rogue or something. I might have gone if it were Cabaret, because at least the music makes contextual sense in that, but I find musicals a turn-off so spared myself the price of a ticket.

I was considering going to visit the British Museum, as I was in London, but my daughter had given my wife a birthday present and she didn't "want to be carrying it about inside" so handed it to me. I didn't want to be carrying it about inside either, so gave the museum a miss.

I have just eaten an entire Easter egg for breakfast. Ah, happy days.

7:25am on Saturday, 19th April, 2025:

Zero Minutes

Weird

Come on, ChatGPT, you're smarter than this.

10:10am on Friday, 18th April, 2025:

Card Sorting

Anecdote

In one of my second-year classes, I give (well, gave) my students a wad of cards (which is what I called the pieces of badly-cut A7 paper) upon which were written the words "Something that annoys me as a player of computer games is:". I then invited the students to complete the sentence.

Some students produced hardly anything. Some vented their frustrations and asked for more cards to write on. The latter tended to be the ones who were more design-oriented, but not always. Anyway, once they were pretty well done with writing on the cards, I told them to organise in groups. Then, they had to sort the cards by their content (so not in, say, alphabetical order).

I gave them free rein to do this. Some groups would have 20 piles. Some would have 4 or 5. I'd go around the groups, topping up their own card supply with ones written by students in previous years.

Once the card piles were fairly solid, so that they could put any new cards I gave them into an existing pile, I went through each group asking them what they called their piles. I listed all these on a whiteboard. There would usually be 20 or 30 of them, with some duplicates (more than one group might have an "interface" pile, say).

Some categories were more general examples of others ("pay to win" and "cheating", perhaps, or "art style" and "graphics"). I'd get the students to point out such categories and sub-categories, then ask for some general categories that might connect them together. Thus, we'd construct a tree of categories and sub-categories and sub-...-sub categories of things that students past and present found annoying as a player of computer games.

The result of this exercise was almost always a tree that mapped directly onto the way that computer game development studios are organised: company leadership; sales and marketing; finance and accounting; software development; software support; quality assurance; operations and IT; human resources. The development side would be subdivided into: production management; art and animation; audio; software; design. Occasionally, one or more groups might be missing, but the result was still a mirror of the organisation of a company.

Here are some sample cards to show you what they looked like:

Now the thing is, I have collected a large number of these since I started this exercise in 2011/2012, and have lot of cards as a result.

I don't know how many there are there, but as you can see, there are many.

The students were told that if they didn't want their cards to be used by future generations of students then they should throw them away. I don't think any students ever did this. As a result, all these cards are anonymised and exist with the permission of their author.

I don't know how many students were involved, although I guess you could tell from the handwriting. I don't know the demographics, except that they were all year 2 so at least 95% 0f them would be aged 19-20. I don't even know what year they were written in, although some will refer to older games by name so can be identified that way.

I did have a notion when I started this class that I could later give the cards to a student as a project of some kind, either for their undergraduate capstone or maybe for an MSc dissertation, but that proved impossible in a Computer Science department. It might be useful in a Game Studies context, though.

Anyway, I have no use for them now. If anyone out there wants them, let me know and I'll send you the collection. Otherwise, I'll be throwing them out next time I'm in my office.

11:13am on Thursday, 17th April, 2025:

Green Party Election Broadcast

Anecdote

My elder daughter featured in the Green Party election broadcast that went out on national TV last night. Naturally, I'm very pleased at this.

Here she is collecting litter:

I expect the message here was to show that Bristol Council (of which she's a member) has rejected the proposal to empty bins only once a month.

Here she is in a slightly longer sequence, standing next to the charismatic half of the Green Party leadership, explaining something to a fellow councilor who has a bottle in his pocket.

No, it isn't mandatory for all members of the Green Party to have the same haircut.

8:42am on Wednesday, 16th April, 2025:

CGW Screwdriver

Anecdote

Here's another thing I had in my office at the university but that I'm now throwing out.

This piece of merchandise from Computer Gaming World may be rare, but may not be, but then again may be.

It may be rare, because they only gave out around 50 of them, as far as I know.

It may not be rare, because they had 10,000 made.

It may be rare, because I had two and when I used the other for actual screwdriving, the plastic broke.

This one hasn't been used for screwdriving, so isn't broken. I did once use it to lever open a can of golden syrup, though, as a result of which it's bent.

Well, it was bent. I put it in the recycling bin.

If you have one, it's therefore slightly rarer than it was before.

8:30am on Tuesday, 15th April, 2025:

More Stones

Anecdote

More stones from the Essex Business School.

It's comforting to know that I'm not the only person in the world who's devoid of artistic talent.

9:46am on Monday, 14th April, 2025:

Lanyards

Anecdote

I've started to clear out my office.

OK, so it turned out that I never actually needed 25 lanyards, but I might have done.

8:43am on Sunday, 13th April, 2025:

Ruby Sunday

Anecdote

It's our 40^th wedding anniversary today.

When I pointed this out to my wife, she said, "Oh, is it?" in a vaguely that's-interesting kind of way.

This is how you get to reach 40^th wedding anniversaries.

It also means you don't have to buy anything with rubies in it.

8:58am on Saturday, 12th April, 2025:

Colourisation

Weird

Me: Can you colorize this image?

ChatGPT:

I guess that's a no, then.

I even spoke American to get on its good side!

10:12am on Friday, 11th April, 2025:

WoW Pin

Anecdote

I've started clearing out my office at work, ready for my impending departure at the end of the month. On the cork board behind where I sit was this pin that I was given in 2004.

I think it may have spent too long in the sun.

Rather than attempt to sell it to blind WoW players, I recycled it.

The pin is in the bin.

7:36am on Thursday, 10th April, 2025:

Pink

Anecdote

This box that we got for the dessert course of the BAFTA dinner was worth the price of entry alone (not that I actually paid the price of entry myself, of course). It's made of white chocolate, and inside there's some kind of cake with raspberries on top and ice cream within. it was like a very sopphisticated Easter egg.

The pinkness is because of the lighting. I don't know if it was in any way related to the lights on the London Eye and the avenue of trees leading up to it, but if not then it was a nice coincidence.

I thought that perhaps pink lights only come in one colour or something, but the Internet (specifically, the large language model that barges in at the top of all my searches these days) tells me they don't.

It was something of a running theme, though.

It must have been National Pink Day and I missed the announcement.

2:19pm on Wednesday, 9th April, 2025:

BAFTA

Miscellaneous

I was at the BAFTA games awards yesterday, courtesy of my friend Nigel Roberts (who's a member because he runs the .gg domain name).

He's the one who doesn't look as if he has gorilla arms.

10:07am on Tuesday, 8th April, 2025:

3,300 Claps

Anecdote

I attended the Spring Graduation Ceremony at the university yesterday. It was mainly MSc students who received their degrees, because they don't finish until after the Summer Graduation Ceremony has taken place. I only knew three of them, and I couldn't find them after the ceremony to talk to them, but I managed a wave as they were on their way to the person who was handing them their certificate (well, the tube into which their certificate will go — they get the certificate itself separately).

I wasn't expecting that this would be my final graduation ceremony when I said I'd go along. Ideally, we needed 12 members of staff to attend, and when only four or five had volunteered I said I'd go too. In the end, we had 10 members of staff, or 11 if you count the Acting Vice Chancellor, who formally is a member of our department.

There were 233 students there to receive their degrees. I gave each of them 14 claps (yes, I count!) except the three I knew, who got 21. I also clapped at various points when speeches had been made or sections of the proceedings had been completed. Overall, I must have clapped around 3,300 times.

As for why I clapped this many times, leaving my hands with pins and needles, well I was seated in the chair immediately behind the Pro-Chancellor who was handing out the certificate tubes. This meant that I was in the video recording for every student who received their degree. I couldn't really give my hands a rest when that was the case.

My colleague sitting next to me, who was also in every shot, gave each student 8 claps. She took longer between each clap, though, so didn't look as if she'd stopped early. I'd bear that in mind next time I was at a Graduation Ceremony, if I was ever going to go to one again.

Here's a photo of the students queueing to get their actual degree certificates:

8:57am on Monday, 7th April, 2025:

Crossing

Anecdote

I took this photo this morning for two reasons.

Firstly, they've just repainted the white lines in the village and these are blinding when the sun gets on them. I had my back to the sun when I took the photo, so it doesn't look all that impressive, but it is. They should put ground glass in washing powder if they want people's white shirts to come out super-white.

Secondly, there's a Dott bike there. The last I heard, these didn't have the range to reach the village: they were GPSed to power off and brakes on when they reached the bridge over the A12. That this one made it here suggests either that the range has been extended or someone slung it in the back of a van and dropped it off here to mess with us.

One of these days, I'll have to try one out. Not today, though.

10:01am on Sunday, 6th April, 2025:

Order and Law

Anecdote

Because the university wants a clean break with its volunteers for its severence scheme, we have to sign an agreement to this effect. The university doesn't want to be saddled with law suits alleging unfair treatment while an employee or anything. This is fair enough in my view. However, to make sure that we can't claim not to have known what legal rights we're waiving, we have to engage a solicitor. The university will pay the fees of the solicitor, up to a certain amount. This is also fair enough in my view.

Now, because the university was hoping for something like 200 VSS candidates (I think — it was spoken of in terms of what Surrey's VSS managed), this would be somewhat difficult for individuals to organise within a month. There are maybe 20 law firms in Colchester, few of which have expertise in employment law. The university therefore industrialised the process. They recommended a particular law firm (although we can of course engage a different one if we want), which has set up like a conveyor belt system for holding 20-minute interviews with VSSers.

Because these solicitors charge by 6-minute blocks of time, it's in the university's and client's interest (if not necessarily the solicitors') to automate as much of the process as possible. This actually worked quite well. I received a 3-page summary of work, a 14-page set of terms and conditions, and a 3-page letter of engagement (that I had to sign digitally).

I also had to prove my identity.

Step one: upload a photo of my passport. Not a scan, a photo. Not a photo I took earlier, but a photo I took live, using my phone, paired to my PC. A photo of the passport picture pages, no glare, in focus, nothing intruding on it.

Step two: record a video of myself using my computer's camera. Not one I did earlier, but one taken live. Look at the camera, rotate to show one profile, then rotate to show the other profile.

Step three: upload a photo of my driving licence. I was allowed to use my scanner for this, so I did.

Of these, step one took ages. It turns out it's quite difficult to get a passport to lie flat when open at two pages.

Step two was, surprisingly, a doddle.

Step three was only hard because I couldn't find my driving licence in my wallet. It was hidden behind a coffee shop loyalty card.

With luck, everything I did will be approved on Monday, and I'll be sent a FAQ to read along with a time when I can have my 20-minute interview. If it goes well, I'll sign some paper that says the university will pay my solicitor bill, and I'll be added to the "done" folder.

It's a bit of a palaver, but much better than if I'd had to have organised it all myself.

Hmm, maybe I should take my driving licence out of the scanner now.

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