I may take some time to recover.
The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.
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7:23am on Wednesday, 1st May, 2024:
Anecdote
The mid-week Bhéwonom drop is upon us, so here we are. We're now in the second half of the book in terms of matters and the final third in terms of pages, although you probably couldn't tell that from the pacing. I can see that I'll have to discard some matters after they've all been released.
Matters 26-30 can be found at https://www.youhaventlived.com/bhéwonom/Matters%2026-30.pdf. The book so far is, as always, at http://bhéwonom.com.
The titles are:
Matter 26: Past versus Present
Matter 27: The Judgement of Laura Thorndyke
Matter 28: Suicide is Painful
Matter 29: Platt Fields Park
Matter 30: Brigitte by the Stream
Bhéwonomese visitors are pouring into Dheghōm now while the judges gather evidence.
8:29am on Tuesday, 30th April, 2024:
Anecdote
It's my last lecture of the academic year today: a revision one for my second-year module, CE217.
I may take some time to recover.
2:11pm on Monday, 29th April, 2024:
Weird
I think I'd maybe have placed this notice a bit lower.
You know, so people in wheelchairs might see it.
9:36am on Sunday, 28th April, 2024:
Anecdote
It's time for another drop of five Matters from the Bhéwonom alpha. Sorry if you're not one of the handful of people who are reading these; you can have the day off.
Matters 21-25 can be found at https://www.youhaventlived.com/bhéwonom/Matters%2021-25.pdf. The book so far is at http://bhéwonom.com.
The titles are:
Matter 21: Juliana Resurrected
Matter 22: The Waking Dead
Matter 23: EVE Not Evolved
Matter 24: Blue Disarmed
Matter 25: The Judgement of Love Ellis
Things start to kick off this time round.
9:49am on Saturday, 27th April, 2024:
Anecdote
Someone in Glendale Heights, Illinois, opened a package this week containing an 1869 map of Europe and thought "What the hell is this?!"
I know this, because that's exactly what I thought when I opened a package and it contained a Ralph Lauren Man's Adult Long Sleeve Dress Shirt Plaid Blue Green Red Pink size 3XB.
It seems our eBay purchases were mislabelled by the seller.
It was an honest mistake, and he's both refunded my money and offered a different map for free (which I turned down; he's already out of pocket from the postage).
Interestingly, it was I who received my package first, rather than the bloke in Glendale Heights who lives in the same country as the seller. I thought the Royal Mail was inefficient, but the US Postal Service clearly outclasses it in that department.
8:35am on Friday, 26th April, 2024:
Anecdote
It was final-year project demonstration day yesterday.
ChatGPT famously loves the words "delve" and "robust", so I thought I'd check the frequency of the use of these words in the abstracts that students presented for their work.
I decided to compare the 2024 abstracts with those of 2021, largely because I actually kept a copy of those. There are 234 abstracts in the former set and 345 in the latter.
Uses of "robust" or derivatives (not counting double uses in the same abstract):
2021 — 3
2024 — 23
Uses of "delve" or derivatives (likewise):
2021 — 1
2024 — 10
I expect that students will learn to edit those words out in future.
7:23am on Thursday, 25th April, 2024:
Anecdote
Many online discussions attract posts that detract from or derail the overall conversation. Creating such a post goes by the name "shitposting".
I posted this earlier this week.
Why be figurative when you can be literal?
7:55am on Wednesday, 24th April, 2024:
Anecdote
It's time for the mid-week drop of Bhéwonom chapters. With luck, this time I won't post it as a comment to someone else's post on Facebook and the people there will see it.
Matters 16-20 are available for direct download at https://www.youhaventlived.com/bh%c3%a9wonom/Matters%2016-20.pdf. The titles are:
Matter 16: Hamas Commander’s Luck Runs Out
Matter 17: Experiment VA2
Matter 18: Spiritwing 2
Matter 19: The Rule of Revereshow
Matter 20: The Elevator Incident
As usual, all the Matters so far can be found at www.bhéwonom.com.
There is a novel emerging out of all this, honest!
1:59pm on Tuesday, 23rd April, 2024:
Anecdote
The square photos are what resulted when I gave Midjourney my graduation photo (in the top left corner) and the prompt "https://mud.co.uk/temporary/RAB.jpg color portrait photograph of a new graduate --v 6.0 --no hat".
It took 44 attempts before it produced a picture of a student who's recognisably male. The only one that came close before then was the other one with glasses (5 along in row 3, with the unattached tassel from the mortarboard), which at full size has some whiskers on the chin.
There are many versions that change my ethnicity, but way, way more that change my gender. I don't think I look female in that picture, but maybe that would explain why I didn't have any luck with girls when I was in my teens.
Try it out yourself if you don't believe me. Putting the word "male" before "student" fixes the problem, but I wonder why there's a problem in the first place. I'm thinking it's the hair.
After I mis-spelled "colour" for it, too!
My wife thinks this is hilarious....
12:28pm on Tuesday, 23rd April, 2024:
Anecdote
I write down all my appointments in a physical diary, so I don't have to try to synchronise the three or four online diaries that various organisations believe are the only one I should use. I do have the online diaries, I just don't see why I should tell the university what I'm doing during periods the university isn't paying me for my time.
While I was asleep last night, it occurred to me that I probably had a revision lecture soon. I knew I had two in April, but didn't recall seeing them in my diary. When I awoke, I checked my diary and there was nothing there about any revision lectures, so I checked online.
Hmm. Turns out there was one at 9am today.
Fortunately, I was able to get to the university in time to deliver the lecture, but it rather knocked my plans for the day out of whack.
All this happened because I wrote the revision lecture back in October, before I'd bought my 2024 diary.
My other revision is next week. That one now is in the diary.
9:25am on Monday, 22nd April, 2024:
Anecdote
Over the weekend, we went to the Supermarionation exhibition currently on at Colchester Castle. A few old favourites were on display, including:
Steve Zodiac out of Fireball XL5.
Scott Tracy out of Thunderbirds.
Parker and Lady Penelope out of Thunderbirds.
Melody Angel and Rhapsody Angel out of Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons.
Captain Scarlet out of Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons.
Elsewhere in the museum was this small bust of "Emperor Scarlet".
One of the people who was looking at the Supermarionation exhibition thought was a genuine Roman relic rather than a joke, and that the Captain Scarlet model had been based on him (I think he was actually based on Cary Grant, but could be wrong).
Disappointingly, almost all the puppets on display were replicas. Even the "original" works weren't all that impressive (Scott Tracy's chair is original, but it's original in the sense that it was the very one used to make a Kitkat advert in 1993).
The only puppets that actually were original, as in used in the original TV series, were Melody Angel and Rhapsody Angel. This was something of a silver lining to the cloud, as Rhapsody was one of my favourite characters; if I'd been told in 1967 that I'd one day get to meet her, 7-year-old me would have been thrilled.
The rest of the castle museum had fewer exhibits that it used to have, following its most recent revamp. Maybe it's so that schoolkids don't get bored so quickly, but it felt rather empty to me. If I was taking a visitor around, I'd have to warn them not to get their hopes up first.
10:51am on Sunday, 21st April, 2024:
Comment
It's time to drop the next five matters from Bhéwonom. No-one commented on the second set, which I take to be a sign that it's not going very well and I'll need to reorder, rewrite or remove some of it.
Anyway, here are matters 11-15, which you can download as a group from https://www.youhaventlived.com/bhéwonom/Matters%2011-15.pdf:
Matter 11: No Philosopher's Stone
Matter 12: Butterflies
Matter 13: The April 1st Ghost
Matter 14: Two Books
Matter 15: Experiment VA1
The first two drops remain accessible from http://www.bhéwonom.com/.
8:53am on Saturday, 20th April, 2024:
Anecdote
We had an AI symposium at the university yesterday.
Jeez, those chairs in the STEM centre have been designed to look good, but they're dreadful for sitting on. They're way too hard. I can still feel the effects on my rump this morning.
7:41am on Friday, 19th April, 2024:
Weird
From Janet Murray's book, Inventing the Medium:
I've noticed that for some time, a lot of programmers haven't really used else clauses where we would have done 40 years ago. Conditional expressions are also largely ignored. Is it simply because compilers are now so good at optimising that they don't need to bother, or is there some other reason?
8:30am on Thursday, 18th April, 2024:
Comment
Last year, the Vice Chancellor of Essex University decided to retire and handed in his notice, giving us a year to find a replacement.
An extensive international recruitment process was begun, but there were problems behind the scenes. Candidates were interviewed but either we turned them down or they turned us down (I don't know which, but probably both), so the search continued. It's hard to figure out exactly what happened, because all this happens behind closed doors for reasons of confidentiality; an unsuccessful candidate could have problems with their current institution if word of their ambitions got out. Nevertheless, we knew a month ago that there were still some issues, and yesterday all members of staff were sent an email saying that the recruitment process has not been successful and we're soon to be short one VC.
A professorial member of the University Senate will be appointed as acting VC in the meantime. There will definitely be candidates for this, because it's only for a year. Whether the acting VC will want to apply to become full-time VC when the advertisements go out again remains to be seen/
This reminds me of when we tried to appoint a replacement professor of computer games. Our requirements were set so high that world-class researchers weren't even approached, they were removed from the shortlist on the grounds that they didn't quite tick all the boxes. I don't know if it's the same with the search for a VC, but it certainly wouldn't surprise me if Essex University's own view of its status is somewhat higher than that of potential applicants for the post.
What's certainly true is that having a well-publicised £13.8m shortfall in the university's projected income next year won't make finding a replacement easier.
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Copyright © 2024 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).