The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.
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9:48am on Friday, 25th April, 2025:
Anecdote
I think it's probably time I consigned these books to the recycling bin.
I haven't read them in two decades, but did have the pleasure of possessing them. Now, sadly for these books, I want the pleasure of having bookcase shelf space more than I want the pleasure of possessing them.
Most of my students don't even know what a strategy guide is.
5:35pm on Thursday, 24th April, 2025:
Anecdote
The most annoying thing about switching to a car with automatic transmission after driving ones with manual transmission for four decades is the lever that switches between forward and reverse. You push it forward to go backwards and pull it backwards to go forward. This is counter-intuitive. OK, so I can memorise it, but that still makes it annoying.
I've finally managed to get to grips with it. It works like windows scroll in a graphical user interface. Scrolling down moves the contents of a window up; scrolling up moves the contents of a window down. If the world is the window and the car is the contents of the window, then pulling back moves the contents up and pulling back moves the contents down.
It's still annoying, but less annoying.
Now I only need to find a way to remember that when I've put the car into parking mode at traffic lights, I should press the brake and then move the lever thing, because pressing the lever thing does nothing.
7:34am on Wednesday, 23rd April, 2025:
Anecdote
Because I have to find room to accommodate several hundred books from my university office, I've started to clear some shelves of older books I no longer need. These travel guides are all going, for example:
Weirdly, I was in an antiques shop at the weekend and one of the stands was selling travel books just like these ones. Well, it had them for sale, anyway; whether they were actually selling any of them is another matter. I doubt that even charity shops would want these, so they're going for recycling instead.
There are some nice memories there, but we have photos that are nicer and take up less room on bookshelves.
7:36am on Tuesday, 22nd April, 2025:
Comment
The university has put this new inspirational instruction on one of the walls in Square 4:
I assume that by "rewrite the rules" it means "write out the same rules". Otherwise, rewriting the rules does itself change the game.
Obviously, it doesn't apply to those students who get large language models to write their essays for them.
8:53am on Monday, 21st April, 2025:
Weird
Three days ago, I was looking at Facebook posts when my wife came up to me holding her camera.
This was convenient, because I wanted to show her something. "Look", I said, excitedly. "Louise has got engaged!" (Louise is one of my nieces).
My wife showed me the photograph she'd just taken outside.
Louise lives near the Welsh border and got engaged in York, so this was just a coincidence. It was still spooky, though.
8:35am on Sunday, 20th April, 2025:
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:
Weird
Come on, ChatGPT, you're smarter than this.
10:10am on Friday, 18th April, 2025:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
Anecdote
It's our 40th 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 40th wedding anniversaries.
It also means you don't have to buy anything with rubies in it.
8:58am on Saturday, 12th April, 2025:
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:
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.
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Copyright © 2025 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).