The clocks went forward three weeks ago. Perhaps F&M don't hold with such new-fangled time-adjustment fashions.
The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.
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9:11am on Sunday, 19th April, 2026:
Anecdote
I was on one of the juries for the BAFTA games awards that were presented this week, so I thought I'd explain how these things are decided for the enlightenment of those who don't know.
There are 18 categories. One of these, the Fellowship, goes to an individual and is decided upon using an arcane system to which I'm not privy. The rest are decided by votes.
First, there's a list of nominations. Companies get to nominate their own games, but it costs £220+VAT for each one, or twice as much for a late entry, which discourages developers from blanket-entering. Also, they have to make their games available to be played for free by the BAFTA games electorate (of whom there are around 1,400). The games must have been released within a set period, which is something like mid-November to mid-November, so some late 2024 games were on the 2026 list. The games are entered in different categories, but there's no extra charge for each category; we do therefore see some blanket entries, although a few categories have eligibility criteria. You're not going to be able to name which voice artist you're putting up for a voice-artist award if your game doesn't use any voice artists.
The games are played by the BAFTA members and they vote on them. There are so many games — around 200 — that few people are going to play them all, and even if they do, they won't necessarily play them for very long. I myself played 40 or so well enough to form an opinion on them. Some of the others were clearly no-hopers from their descriptions, and some looked promising but were console-only and I don't have a console. Some of the games, I'd already played so didn't have to play again.
For two of the categories (best game and best British game), that's the end of the story. The ones that scored highest are the winners. Both my votes in those categories won, so I'm pleased with that.
For the remaining 15 categories, there are juries. The highest-scoring games in each category are put forward into a longlist. I don't know what the rules are for deciding this, but I suspect it's something sensible like "the top X games that scored more than a threshold of Y votes". There were 11 such games in the category for which I was on the jury. Overall, about a third of the games that were entered made it to one or more longlists.
There are nine to twelve members of each jury (mine hadd twelve). Jurors have to play all the games on their longlist. I'd already played most of the ones on mine, either naturally (nothing to do with BAFTA) or in the earlier voting process, but I replayed those anyway. The games are discussed one by one, then there is a vote. The top six games in the vote comprise the shortlist. Shortlists seem to be the reason that we have the juries: it means that the top six are decided by actual experts rather than publicity campaigns, and it reduces the noise from voters who perhaps weren't as diligent in their decision-making as they might have been. The six nominees will have short showreels shown prior to the actual award, and being nominated for a BAFTA is seen as a feather in the cap, so the discussion to decide the final six is earnest. None of the jury members know what the other jurors voted for, nor do they know how many votes each game received.
Oh, as a note to future entrants: if you use AI to fill in your nomination forms, that's going to give the impression you're not serious about the awards.
Given the top six, the jury now has to decide which one is the eventual winner. There's a second round of discussion, with arguments made for and against each game. Maybe if there's an obvious winner, this doesn't happen, but in my jury there were several strong contenders so we did have a lively discussion. At the end, we all voted for the one we believed should win. In the event of a draw, I believe we would have to vote again, but there wasn't a draw in my jury's case.
Here's the key point: the jury members don't know which of the six shortlisted nominees won. It's all done electronically, and only the auditors find out. Therefore, although I could tell you in advance of the awards which games were in contention (well, I could have done if it was allowed), I couldn't tell you which one won because I didn't know. I could only say which one got my vote. As it happened, that one did indeed win, but I didn't find that out until it was announced at the ceremony.
There was one big surprise for me in the awards. Back in October, I wrote "given that the soundtrack for Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 topped the Billboard classical chart for ten weeks, I think it's safe to say that if it doesn't win the music BAFTA there's something seriously wrong."; it didn't win the music BAFTA, therefore there is something seriously wrong. Whether that's with the Billboard classical chart or the BAFTA music jurors' tastes I don't know, but it certainly caused me to raise an eyebrow.
8:01am on Saturday, 18th April, 2026:
Weird
I took this photograph outside Fortnum & Mason's yesterday at 10am.
The clocks went forward three weeks ago. Perhaps F&M don't hold with such new-fangled time-adjustment fashions.
7:21am on Friday, 17th April, 2026:
Anecdote
Occasionally, I take 3D photos. Here's an example I took on Wednesday, a three-minute walk from our house:
Cross your eyes, bring it into focus, and you'll see it in 3D.
I took this one because the farmer had helpfully lowered the height of the hedge using some kind of hedge-lowering machine. Normally, this view would be obscured by a mass of brambles.
Masses of brambles also make good 3D photos, but I can see those in my own garden, I don't have to walk down a country lane packed with dog-walkers to do so.
8:30am on Thursday, 16th April, 2026:
Weird
Legend has it that an orang utang ran into this tree near our house, where it was frozen in time forever.
8:55am on Wednesday, 15th April, 2026:
Weird
There used to be a large church in Colchester named after St Nicholas. It had a huge spire and dominated the High Street.
It was built by the Saxons in about 1000AD on the site of a Roman building, from the time when Colchester was capital of the province of Britain (a position it held until Boudicca burned it down). It was completely rebuilt in ther 1300s, and then rebuilt and extended in 1875-1876 by Sir George Gilbert Scott, who was the architect of many churches along with the Albert Memorial and the Midland Grand Hotel at St Pancras station in London. This is when the enormous spire was added.
Attendance dropped off in the 1950s, and the church was demolished in 1955. The land was bought by the Co-Operative Society, which built a department store on the site. The Co-Op ran into money problems in the 2000s, and in 2010 closed the store and several others in Essex. St Nicholas House has now broken up into units, but the original façade remains. In the 1950s, you could demolish thousand-year-old churches with impunity, but in the 2010s you had to keep the exterior appearance of fifty-year-old buildings.
This stone plaque therefore remains on the side of the building, as it was when the Co-Operative Society built the structure:
If they couldn't spell "labour" properly, the store was doomed to fail.
8:49am on Tuesday, 14th April, 2026:
Anecdote
Argh! Bacon fingers!
Co-op carrier bags need better handles.
8:45am on Monday, 13th April, 2026:
Anecdote
A couple of these unmanned kiosks have popped up in the village.
This one is for baked goods; the other, which I suspect does more business because it's near the school, sells sweets.
Both mention that they're monitored by CCTV, to discourage thieves.
Placing the baked goods one outside the pub where the sun will be on it for half a day may also discourage thieves.
9:56am on Sunday, 12th April, 2026:
Weird
Here's another example of Victorians leading the way in the innovative use of modern technology.
7:57am on Saturday, 11th April, 2026:
Anecdote
Oh great. For the past two days, it's felt like a Saturday, and now it actually is a Saturday, it feels like a Sunday.
This retirement malarkey plays merry hell with the days of the week.
8:43am on Friday, 10th April, 2026:
Weird
In the Barnaby Grudge cartoon of the latest issue of Viz, the plot concerns ownership of a mug.
This is the mug:
Hornsea is, of course, my home town.
The fame of Hornsea Pottery lives on!
8:32am on Thursday, 9th April, 2026:
Weird
From one of the Victorian editions of Punch I have on my shelves.
It's uncanny how our forebears could predict uses of artificial intelligence when large language models were 150 years away.
8:53am on Wednesday, 8th April, 2026:
Weird
In those places in the village where the potholes are alarming but there's no available place to put a "hole" sign, some friendly local has taken to outlining the worst ones in red spray-paint.
In another part of the village, they used yellow paint. One of the ones marked thus was subsequently filled in with tarmac, which suggests that the council may have been responsible. They only did the one, though, so perhaps not. The red ones aren't marked by the council, because they're efficiently refreshed every so often with new paint.
In a party political broadcast for the Labour party yesterday, which was intended to address the local elections coming up next month, the Prime Minister spent his time telling us that he didn't go to war against Iran but that the Conservatives and Reform would have done. The Greens and Liberal Democrats wouldn't have joined in either, but he didn't mention that.
Our local TV news went out and about asking people in the region whether they would be voting, and if so, for which party. In the interest of balance, a vox pop was found to support each viewpoint (along with one intending not to vote) , but when asked what the most pressing matter was for them, the answers were universal accross the spectrum: potholes.
Sir Keir Starmer may have correctly figured that local elections are often regarded as a referendum on how well the national government is doing, but that's worth nothing if what really, really gets voters annoyed is a surfeit of holes in the road.
If only there were a tax explicitly created to finance keeping roads in good repair. It could be paid yearly, and be due for every roadworthy vehicle. "Road Tax" would be a good name.
8:26am on Tuesday, 7th April, 2026:
Miscellaneous
The Essex University weekly email shot, imaginatively named Essex Weekly, got around to mentioning that I'd been inducted into the UKIE Hall of Fame. The mention itself wasn't much, but it did link to a web page. I thought this was going to be the UKIE one, but I was wrong: the university made one itself.
https://www.essex.ac.uk/news/2026/03/23/essex-gaming-pioneer-inducted-into-hall-of-fame
As you can see, that award really is more orange than anything other than an orange.
8:22am on Monday, 6th April, 2026:
Outburst
I remember when Easter eggs were shaped like eggs.
Now, they're shaped like Thunderbird 2.
8:27am on Sunday, 5th April, 2026:
Anecdote
We were in a charity shop recently and bought a toy for our grandson. He's a bit young for it at the moment, but I'm sure it will bring him hours of education, or at least entertainment, when he gets older.
So, it's like one of those paper dress-up dolls you can get, but it's made of plywood. Also, you don't so much dress him up as dress him down. You start with a boy, then you take off his clothes, then you take off his skin, then you take off his muscles, then you take off his everything else until he's just a skeleton.
It's ... er ... well-intentioned.
You can remove different individual parts, you don't have to take the whole body to the same level. Want to see what a naked boy with a skeleton head and visible intestines looks like? You can do it.
Here are two simple examples, where I kept him clothed but burrowed into his head.
One looks like Homer Simpson, the other looks as if he didn't put on enough suntan lotion.
You can make great zombies with it, as I'm sure you can imagine. As for the groin area, well my wife and daughter we howling with laughter at what they could do with that, but I didn't look at their creations for fear of psychological trauma.
Quite why the hair stays on until you reach the skull, I don't know. So much for anatomical correctness.
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Copyright © 2026 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).