Gandalf, dwarves, just missing Mr Baggins!

Today's post is part 2 of the tale of my first steps into the world of Lord of the Rings online, the only MMO that I have any interest in playing, because I am a sucker for that sweet Tolkien juice.

I am still working out the camera controls.

My first moments in middle earth, and I am immediately accosted by a behatted fellow and instructed that I need to hang out with him for a bit. So here we are, presumably starting out in a flashback, for a couple of cameo appearances from Thorin and Company so that we can get our first big hit of that I'm really in the Lord of the Rings feeling. Then I meet my first non-canon character, who Thorin evidently trusts despite his name being Dourhand, so I'm pretty sure that I can can mark him down as someone I'm going to have to fight before the end of the tutorial right now.

Maybe I'm not a great listener, but it took me quite a few goes to get used to the targeting system used for both talking to folks and attacking things in LoTRO. My first forays into the mines to fight some rats is an even worse struggle with the controls for targeting and camera controls than usual, but thankfully that's utterly irrelevant since it seems like my character heals fast than these things can damage me and I have 100s of hit points, so there's plenty of time to experiment. I experiment a little with my skills, too, since they're available even though I haven't been told about them yet, but none of them seem all that much more effective that just clicking on heads and waiting for things to die just yet.

After fighting a good number of rats and getting to watch the cinematics for a bit, I prepare myself to help Gimli fight a mountain troll, which seems like quite an escalation for a level two character, but at this point it seems like I'm going to need something that big to provide a challenge. Just as I'm about to leap into the fray Gandalf saves the day, though, so I don't get a chance to find out just how many hit points a hit from something like that can do to me. I'm guessing it's a lot, but presumably I'm going to have to fight a lot more rats until I get to that point.

The timeskip ends suddenly, catapulting forward in time, and I'm a bit worried that I missed something in the tutorial, as I only got the very basics of talking to NPCs, using the inventory and hitting stuff with my knife, still nothing about using skills, grouping up, interacting with other players or anything else. Then I hang out with the sons of Elrond for a bit and realise that I'm still in the tutorial, such as it is, after all when I finally get some skills training, which consists of buy skill, press button, profit. Welp, that's something, I guess.

I get lost on my the way to my first quest that doesn't have a flashing icon right in front of me when I go for a run down the mountain. Eventually I more or less work out the basics of using the minimap, but I'm sure they could have made things more obvious; already the lack of some quality of life features that people talk about when discussing LotRO are becoming evident.There are some mobs down here, but they're very passive, I can sit there and beat up their friends right next to them and they'll just sit there politely until I decide it's their turn to be attacked. I assume that this is just a setting for the beginning areas, because otherwise walking around middle-earth is going to prove to be very boring very quickly.

Sure, they're evil, but you have to admire what they've done with the place.

I complete a couple of basic fetch quests and meet up with Dwalin and Dourhand again, and surprise surprise, it looks like the fellow with the obviously evil name has some kind of dark secret cult thing going on over here. Guess I'm going to have to break that up soon, but for now I get to play it friendly with everyone. Dwalin and his buddies send me to fight some poisoned bears and I collect some antidotes to heal up some fellows who've suddenly gotten very sleepy while fighting off a bunch of meanie dwarves, and then I take a rest myself (unsure if this was a new mechanic that I was being introduced to) and Galadriel takes me off to a cutscene dreamland for some sweet cinematic prophetic visions. All properly epic.

Somewhere along to way I pick up this ridiculous hat, which isn't very dwarvish to my eyes, but is very minstrel, so of course I equipped it and immediately headed off to the mirror to make sure it's tilted at just the right angle to properly accentuate Wolomur's manly face. I'd previously been thinking of him as more of an ancestral voice of my people kind of guy, but am a bit worried if he wears this hat too long he might not be able to resist suddenly morphing into a rakish fop like every other bard I've ever played as.

As I level up and have to choose a specialisation, this seems like a good place to stop for the week. I'm assume that I'll decide on the Warrior Skald path, since I'm likely to be playing this game solo and that seems to be least party-focused of the options, but at least thematically I'd pegged him as a Watcher of Resolve fellow, so perhaps I'll go that way in the hope of making myself vaguely useful to a group somewhere down the road since none of that looks even vaguely useful to a solo player. If there's any old LotRO hands out there that have any advice before I next venture out into middle-earth again, do let me know.

Meme Time

I've given up hope of getting the theoretical weekly quiz up on a Wednesday Thursday Fri... at all for the second week in a row, I was once again left unsure about what to fill the empty slot with. I turned to my blog feed for inspiration, and found that I've been tagged in a meme. Somehow I feel like viral images and videos have taken over the term these days, but the old faithful circular blog meme reminds me of my youth in the big wide scary exciting livejournal internet days and I never fail to smile a little whenever my little blog garners a tag; so I refuse to give up using the word 'meme' to describe them even if the world has moved on without me and the children look at me like I'm crazy.

One could pretend to be dank, or one could post cats.

The Rules

• Thank the person who tagged you for the award.
• Answer the 7 questions set out by your nominator.
• Tell everyone 7 things about yourself — you can spread them between answering the questions!
• (Optional) Write another 7 questions to ask the people you tag.
• (Optional) Tag 7 people to carry forward the Real Neat Versatile Blog Award and answer your questions while revealing 7 facts about themselves. :)

The Thanks

It feels a little cheap now that I've been specifically told that I have to do this, but thanks for Naithin for the tag. Naithin is one of those folks that really gets across a strong sense of his personality in his posts, so much so that it feels like he's one of the folks who've been around the Blaugust tracks for ages, when I've actually only known of him since last Blaugust (unless my memory is playing tricks on me?). His blog is always human, down-to-earth, considered and interesting, and I always click when I see him come up in my reader, something that I can't say about all that many others (sorry guys, I just gotta be in the mood, that's all!). I think it helps that while he's a little older and a little more of an MMO guy than I am (who isn't?), we seem to have a pretty similar gaming background and shared videogame canon, so his posts always feel relevant. Of particular interest to me of late has been his ongoing Humble Choice series each month to help me decide which games to grab, and more importantly which to actually dive into instead of leaving them in the ever-increasing backlog pile, when my monthly bundle comes through. If you're not familiar with his blog, do check it out.

The Answers

If you were to start another blog, or branch off your current blog into a whole new direction, what would it be about?

The Leaflocker is quite the meandering, haphazard, all over the place kind of blog. If I were spin off something new I'd like it to be something with a laser focus on a single topic that I'd decided to explore in depth. Actually, somewhere back in the deep dark past I did start a blog like that for my adventures in heraldry inside the Society for Creative Anachronism. It's called Orle Athwart, it has three whole posts, and though I haven't touched it in almost five years and prior to this moment I don't think that I've ever even mentioned it to anyone, suddenly I have rekindled fond hopes of getting it off the ground and really diving into heraldry again in a big way at some point.

Somewhere about ten years ago now, I can't even remember how or why, I started getting interested in the heraldry aspects of the SCA. The actual dressing up and saying 'forsooth' stuff would take me many years to begin to even think about getting involved in, and was cut off when I moved to England where people view the inherently make-believe aspects of role-players like the SCA with suspicion in favour of more authentic historical reenactment, but I've remained involved in commentary on heraldry matters the whole time. It's a weird thing that's very divorced from every other aspect of my life (except when people from my 'real' life see SCA stuff on facebook and get very confused), but something in the combination of research, pedantry, repetition, artistry and faux-seriousness just strikes a chord, so I keep coming back to it.

What mix of mechanics or genres would form your absolute dream game?

Looking at the games that I've poured the most time into over the years since I had a choice about what to install on my own computer, there are two standouts. One is CounterStrike. I am terrible at  CS mechanically, but the rhythm of the game, the need for teamwork and communication, the flow of the game back and forth, the thinking on the fly, exploiting weaknesses and getting inside people's heads is intoxicating. The other is turn-based strategy games like Into the Breach or Invisible Inc, games with small scope where each and every tiny detail is important, where every moment presents a new puzzle to be solved, a new danger to overcome with a limited number of resources. So, combining the team/real-time aspects of CS with the intimate but deep nature of TBS's? Something like Captain Sonar, enforced by the computer and turned up to eleven, would be great. I feel like you probably have to pick a theme for a dream game too, but honestly, I'd take anything that's not grim-dark-souls-esque, as that aesthetic does nothing for me.

Wait just a second... Is "off to grease my abacus" a euphemism?

My father was constantly bringing home bits and pieces of old computers from his work at the national telecom provider and botching together old machines, so we always had computers in our house, but apart from a couple of exceptions like Myst and Civilization II (I was the only person I knew that actually had a legit version with the manual and everything, and was very confused when my friends looked at me strangely when I quoted the video clips from the advisors) we didn't tend to have games other than freeware versions, demo disks and things that had 'accidentally' ended up there. We didn't have consoles at all (I inherited a NES when I was about 15, I think) and didn't have to buy expensive cartridges and play the life out of them to justify the expense, so as a result largely I was playing bits and pieces of lots of different games but never really dived all that much into any one thing, right up until about high school.

What thing (game, book, movie, anything) have you experienced recently, thinking it should be right up your alley — only to find it very much was not?

With the advent of the whole 'locked in our houses all the time with nothing to do' thing, my old role-playing group back in Australia is getting the band back together digitally. Well, I say my old role-playing group, but we got it all set-up and ready to go and then I left for England and got a day job, so they've been playing without me for the last four years or so. Tabletop roleplaying games (the group is actually playing Pathfinder) seem like they'd be right up my alley; you get to fight stuff, take a break for a cup of tea and to consult a large and esoteric encyclopedia, rules-lawyer to your heart's content and think of creative solutions to problems if the fancy strikes you. Unfortunately, though, when it actually comes down to it and I'm in these situations, I just freeze up and end up going through the same old mechanical motions. I have no idea why and I wish it wasn't the case, but there you go. We're going to give it another try starting some time in the next few weeks (once I actually design my character, that sounds like a blog post right there), and I'm half-excited because I still like the idea of getting into it and just hanging out on the regular with some friends that I don't see enough of, and half-terrified because deep down I know it'll be another unmitigated disaster.

I found it pretty difficult to find something to stick in this category, because these days I'm finding myself to be pretty stuck in my ways. It's not that I haven't been trying new things, reading new books, playing new games and the like, but for the most part I'm straying out of my comfort zone a lot less. Every now and then I worry that I'm becoming a more boring person than the adventurous youth that I once was, but it's more comforting to think of it as knowing myself pretty well and having a pretty good idea what I like. Oh no...am I old now? Do I have to start voting Conservative?

The opposite! Have you been convinced to try anything you thought you wouldn’t enjoy, only to discover you very much loved it after all? What was it?

THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN

On finding an old-school nib pen I recently did a little bit of experimenting in calligraphy, trying out of a sort of casual interest to see if I could find a style that I could execute somewhat proficiently with it. I didn't expect to do any good at this, since I don't have the eye for detail, a sense of perspective needed in all visual art, or good hand-eye co-ordination; and indeed I really didn't do very well at all and some of my attempts at the more complex letter-forms are truly laughable. Despite this, I found the act of trying to replicate consistent letters and the slow progression of forming more and more difficult words as I worked my way through a few tutorials extremely centering, and quickly burned through page after page of my working notebook.  The unsightly blue-black inkstain on my fingers that takes a serious scrubbing to remove is very satisfying too.

I have tried many, many hobbies over the years and I have a pile of theoretically ongoing but actually stalled projects that dates back well over a decade, but I suppose readers of this blog aren't likely to be surprised by that, since there's projects just on this blog that are approaching that kind of age. I tend to throw myself into something for a week or two, devoting all my free time and thought and a significant number of sleepless nights to thinking about it, before moving on to something new, never exactly abandoning or consciously stopping anything, just not keeping it in my short-term memory banks. Actually, the usual time is about twelve days (for confirmation, see my pattern of Blaugust posting over the last few years), which is just a couple of days short of the supposed magical line that you need to reach to solidify new habits. Maybe that is why I'm still stuck in many of the patterns that I developed years ago and the structure of my days has barely changed since I was a teenager. Hrmm, maybe a person only has room in their head for so many habits, and since I've avoided making new ones for so long that's why I'm still stuck with my childhood ones of chewing my fingernails and starting to talk before other people have finished their sentences.

What new thing do you most want to achieve with your blog this year?

I've always wanted the Leaflocker to be an outlet for creativity. Somewhere to share new experiments and skills, to revel in others' projects, to show some progress and to drive me on to bigger and better things. Occasionally I feel like I started out more that way and got distracted by 'blog busywork' of either producing the same old thing week after week (for the week that I produce anything) or consuming more and more media without it sparking any output, along the way. I know that in a lot of ways this is a reflection of the fact that I just don't produce all that much stuff, but if I could find a way to conjure the occasional feeling that I get during a Blaugust that the Leaflocker can act as an engine for creativity not an anchor for it, that'd be one heck of a goal for the ole blaug.

Not sure I have a fact on my mind that really gels with this one, so I guess I'll just share something on my mind at the moment. We live in a small terrace house quite close to our neighbours, which isn't usually a problem (apart from my love/hate relationship with a pair of perpetually yapping dogs), but sadly during this quarantine, (at least) one of our neighbours has been smoking pot twice every afternoon, once around noon and again later on (around the traditional time for such activities). The smell spreads quickly throughout our whole house each and every day, and it never fails to give me an absolutely terrible headache. I'm just glad that I only developed this reaction the the stuff later in life, or I would have been a lot worse off at high school.

What’s on your wishlist that you most want to buy, but for whatever reason you haven’t pulled the trigger on purchasing yet?

First visitor we've had in months

Since we've moved to Southampton we've been strongly considering getting a car, as we're within excellent day and weekend trip distance of lots of interesting bits and pieces, and we'd also like the ability to travel back to visit folks in Oxford and the occasional mahjong tournament without being at the mercy of the vagaries of the UK's rail network and it's frankly mystical pricing system. We went from being a two car family back in Australia to being strictly public transport or cycling people in Oxford, but even though here in Southampton we can easily do all our day to day stuff the same way,  as we hope to have more free time now that the thesis is over it feels like it might be time to think about investing in a vehicle again. There are lots of reasons not to, of course. We don't have a garage and would need to park it on an already-crowded street, we would have to go through the process of securing driver's licenses here, we probably wouldn't use it often enough to keep it in good condition (there are a lot of cars failing to start around here, after not having been used for a few weeks, and seeing people standing over an open bonnet looking perplexed is a regular feature of my exercise walks), the environmental concerns (we're already climate baddies due just to emissions from our  biennial flight to Australia), and of course, the main one is the cost of keeping and maintaining a car, even a little one. That said, we are Australians, I suspect the siren call of the road is something that comes from growing up breathing the air of a wide brown country and that it will ultimately prove irresistible.

All this being stuck in a house with only me and YouTube for company has finally pushed Mrs. Owl over the edge on the purchase that she has been putting off for the last four years or so, and I opened the door late last week to find a guitar on our doorstep. We're enjoying being a musical household again, even if neither of us can hold a tune and the amount of time that she can strum at the moment is very limited given the strain that it puts on her out-of-practice arthritic fingers. I cannot stress enough how much joy just having access to a musical instrument in the house has brought us both over the last few days, and don't know how we went so long without one. If I had my way, no household would be without a musical instrument. If I'm subjected to our neighbour's questionable musical taste for too many more weeks I might change my mind on that point, but for now I'm sticking to it. At least until someone on the street gets a set of bagpipes.

When this whole lockdown thing is over; and the shops/services currently closed reopen, what is the first thing you’ll visit/do?

Well done, ye generally rubbish but surprisingly faithful servants

For months, even pre-quarantine, the answer has been the same. I most desperately need some new shoes. My old ones, which were never all that good in the first place, are now held together with prayer and duct tape and it's only a matter of time until I'm better off going out barefoot than wearing them. Thankfully I don't really have to wear shoes a whole bunch at the moment (my slippers are getting some good use), but as soon as the restriction on non-essential shopping is lifted I'll have to pull the trigger.

I'm bad at shoe shopping. I've always been bad at shoe shopping. To be fair, I'm bad at almost all shopping that's not a regular food shop that I go into with a clear categorised list; I tend to wander up and down the aisles, looking at everything and putting nothing into my trolley, desperately hoping that the attendants don't try to talk to me. Clothes shopping of any kind is just a strange mixture of intimate and public that makes me uncomfortable. Shoes are the worst, though, because while I can and do wear clothes for decades and people can buy them for you if they think you're getting unbearably daggy, you have to buy shoes for yourself, and to do so just regularly enough to be annoying but not often enough that you can get used to it. I also have weirdly shaped bulgy feet, so I tend to have to try on a lot of different pairs to find something that works (which is also why I can't just do it online, the chances of getting lucky with a pair I haven't been able to actually physically try are slim). To top it all off, I inevitably wear through the heel and sole of new shoes in next to no time, make the whole exercise feel generally pointless. So yeah, shoe shopping. Yuk.

The Questions

I am ever-reluctant to tag others in these sort of things, which seems strange given how much I enjoy them, but what can I say? I guess I contain contradictions. Nevertheless, if you've stumbled across this little corner of the internet and find the questions below vaguely interesting or just want an excuse to talk about yourself (I've found this whole experience a lot more enjoyable and involved that I expected to when I set out), please make my day by taking a shot at answering them and filling in some additional facts of your own. No worries if you don't have a blog yourself, either, you can email me or stick your response in the comments, I'm always keen to hear what people have to say.

Tell us about:

That one thing that you're good at that people looking at you, or even that some people that know you, wouldn't guess.

That project that's been sitting on the back-burner for ages that you somehow just never manage to get down to.

The piece of art/music/poetry/game design that most recently made you want to stop in your tracks and just soak it in.

A memory that you remember one way but other people have a completely different take on.

That place, physical or mental, out on the internet or in the real world, where you most feel at peace.

Something that people just don't seem to get about the way that you think, act or react that you wish that you could get them to understand.

A fun website, video or gif that you've recently stumbled across. 

Here's one I stumbled across today that I enjoyed more than I should have. Behold the chicken, bird of prey.

Getting into the groove

For our weekly board games night this week we resorted to the tried and true Codenames, Hanabi and Istanbul implementations that we've used the last couple of weeks, partly because they worked well last time and we're not sick of them just yet, but also because we're still looking around for more diversity of free options that could work well for a large and changing group of people. What we've already tried can keep us rolling for a while, it's never actually about the game but about the people, after all, but a little something new every now and then is always good. Something that can support a lot of players, is free and isn't just Codenames again is our holy grail at the moment, but none of the options that we've tried so far have really hit the jackpot.

Tabletop Simulator seems to be the option that most people seem to swear by, but apart from the occasional really well-put-together game, most of the implementations just lack a level of user-friendliness to allow me to recommend it as an option. Yes, I could definitely get used to using it and hosting people via screenshare, but it's too fiddly for me to reasonably expect my friends to all use successfully, especially given that they'd all have to pay for the engine just to get started.

Tabletopia seems like a slightly better option, if only because the subscription model there allows me to buy an account that will allow my friends to play a pretty decent range of games without having to buy it themselves. It has a lot of the issues of TTS, but at least it's theoretically more accessible and has a really solid range of titles. Unfortunately, the web version seems to be pretty unreliable, and both it and the Steam versions are extremely resource intensive (even my relatively beefy laptop starts to chug a little). I think I'm likely to try this out with those friends that have Steam some time soon, but it's not going to provide a solution for the main games night as it stands currently.

Pretty much the same experience as the card game.

We had some good success with playing Innovation on Board Games Arena this week. I'd been pretty dubious about it given that Innovation is a relatively complex, information rich game, but the interface worked really well despite the limited screen real-estate, so well, in fact, that I think it's actually better than the card game version, and is certainly easier to teach. It probably helps that the art in the card game is nothing to write home about either. Sadly, Innovation isn't really the sort of game that most people really get the hang of in one play and it's definitely not a game for everyone, but I have a little more faith in the BGA interface now and am keen to try it out on an even more ambitious game. It says that it can support Keyflower, and if it actually can, that will be positively miraculous.

I find myself wishing for the IRC days, when folks ran many and varied chat bots that could facilitate all kinds of excellent games. It seems like there are an awful lot of discord bots out there and that most of them seem to be pretty useless on the whole, but I have been meaning to learn to program anyway, so if I'm not able to find something that works for us, perhaps trying to program a game playing python discord bot will become my big quarantine project...

Please, save me from this fate and recommend me something I can use to entertain my friends when Monday rolls around again. I'm a thirty year old man. If I try to learn something new my brainy might overheat as much as my computer does trying to play Village.

Just sit on the line

Last week, I set myself the usual weekly reading target with the best of intentions in getting through the readings and then some, hoping that by this time it got around to this Monday I would not only have blitzed the set readings but also managed to get through some of my other backlog on the side. Despite having a tab with Les Mis open on my pc browser, Plato on my kindle and Dickens ready for me on my phone, I was able to bring myself to complete almost exactly zero reading over the week.

At least one step too far into this series.

The one thing that I have attempted to spend the most time reading, The Long Utopia, the fourth book in Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter Long Earth series, continues at a snail's pace, a source of great frustration to me because I really ought to throw it on the life is too short to care pile, but I just want to like it a tiny bit too much to bring myself to do it. The series is based on a Pratchett short story that I enjoyed, but as it has gone on it has become more and more like every Stephen Baxter book I've ever read, which is to say  ponderous, touching on interesting concepts in the least interesting ways imaginable and either leaving a number of plot points dangling for the inevitable sequel or tying making them irrelevant along the way. The fact that I've spent the time since Christmas when I checked it out of the library trying to get through it when I'd normally demolish a book this size in a week maximum is a good indication of just how well it's going.

As frustrating as I've found this novel, the fact is that it's not the novel's fault that I'm not getting any reading done. It's not the novel's fault that I've struggled to engage with my writing or to produce a crossword this week either. For someone who has been feeling generally like all this being cooped up indoors isn't having that great an affect on his life, I sure am wandering about the house listlessly staring at walls a lot, so maybe I'm just not as unaffected by everything that's going on as I'd like to think I am.

So I've decided to be gentle with myself and just let things happen. Reading is supposed to be fun, so is the blog and so are videogames after all. If that means there's not a weekly Great Conversation piece, somehow I feel like both I and the readership will survive.

In lieu of that, then, let me leave you with this delightful little poem from Jeffrey McDaniel that a  friend linked me just when I needed a good sob earlier in the week.

Let's talk some other time.

The Search for SURY

Here's a post about something weird that I'd planned to write about back in August last year, but didn't quite manage to get out. It's still a fun little mystery, though, so grab a cuppa, have a read, and then help me solve this puzzle that's been stuck in my head for months.

Some time in about July, a strange medallion was glued to the masonry on the external wall of Brasenose College. For at least a couple of weeks, I walked past it each day, noting that it seemed pretty weird but not thinking all that much about it. After a while I mentioned in to the head Porter, wondering if there was strange in-joke that I wasn't it on, and he was a little perplexed by it too. A couple of days later, with some significant effort, the workshop team were able to pry it off (they take a poor view of people making unsanctioned additions to the 500 year old facade).

Deliberate damage to a heritage-listed building. That's a paddlin'.

They handed the coin to one of the students, and as these things tend to do, it migrated to the common room and became the topic of much discussion over cups of tea, and later into the evening, other beverages. What was this medal? Who had placed it on the college? What is SURY? Why the latin for something like "He will not be alone" (I left this bit to others, I have no Latin)? What was with the strange code-like drill holes? What could it all mean? 

14 lines? Like a sonnet?

The puzzle has a way of worming itself into your mind so that you can't stop thinking about it. We started googling everything, seeing strange, half-imagined connections between unrelated webpages on weird corners of the internet. When I came in the next day, I found this (actually, this is the board a couple of days later, I don't have a photo of it in its original state, but it didn't change that much after the first day).

Sometimes you just have to embrace your inner conspiracy theorist

A bit of googling turned up that this logo (oh, it's a winged handshake!) had been posted on the 4th January 2019 on designcrowd.com as a response to a design competition, albeit with different latin. Someone with a decent amount of cash to splash around  had commissioned this, and recently. From the design discussions there are some fascinating insights:

SURY which is just an acronym for (Snob, Urban, Rural, Yob) refer to attachment. It is not really a department store but this is probably the best way (analogy) to explain what the business is.

SURY is not compulsory either. If you have a better name suggestion that you would perhaps use for a "secret mens club" then propose that also. The name itself is not important as it is to be built as a brand hence the importance of the logo.

So, there's a brand, but at least back in January 2019 they're still not really committed to their name, which appears to be an acronym of some nonsensical string of descriptors. There's also a more in depth design pdf, which is pretty baffling all around as a business concept, but does include a proto-version of the logo with the different Latin.

At this point, I'm thinking either that the whole business brief is just a front for getting the logo designed without actually expressing what the 'brand' is really about, which seems like the sort of thing that someone designing a cryptic puzzle game might do, or that this logo was found on this site and co-opted by whoever placed the medallion. I found a couple of potential uses of the latin phrase Sine Qua Non for Australian registered companies, but nothing that seems that promising, so for now this angle feels like a bit of a dead end.

But wait, "He will not be alone".

There's a post on reddit of someone who'd found another coin attached to Blarney Castle on July 5th, which assuming that it was soon after it arrived there would put it at a similar time to the one at Brasenose. Over the next little while a few other people have found them at other locations too, Balloch Park in Scotland, Bolton Abbey, Caerphilly Castle in Wales, Bootham Bar in York. The medallions are all identical, but they all have different holes drilled in them. The turn around from logo design to being cast on coins, drilled strangely and stuck on landmarks no more than six months later (maybe earlier, some of them look more weathered) is pretty impressive.

All(?) our little ducks in a row.

This is not just some freak Oxford thing, this is some kind of deliberate puzzle hunt at historic locations around the UK and Ireland, or even further (who knows what other coins could have been out there and never found, or just not reported to reddit?).

So onto the code itself. Each SURY medal is made up of a grid of 21x14 drilled holes, but every second line is offset. After transcribing the digits and getting rid of the blank columns, I've ended up with six 21x7 binary blocks that just about feels like maybe something like ASCII binary letters if you assume each have a leading 0, but the letters that you come out with don't make any sense. I'm either missing some part of the puzzle or missing something staring me in the face.

21x7 doesn't mean anything to me, but maybe it's sparked something inside your head. If you'd like to jump in and have a play, feel free to take a look at the google sheet here. Maybe it's not a puzzle that can be solved without every single constituent part, but if that were true, why would someone travel hundreds of miles knowing that their coins are going to be removed in short order and people might never find them all? Personally, I hope I haven't seen the end of SURY just yet.

A (small) step into the Road

I've never been a Massively Multiplayer Online game kinda guy. When World of Warcraft came out and it seemed like everyone was playing it our family was still on dial-up connected to a single shared computer, and I was a teenager with the kind of regular job that could support changing that state of affairs. While I've played my fair share of games in the years since acquiring the internet in my own space, I've never been able to develop the kind of regular and consistent hours that I've always assumed needed to be put in to a game in order to get a regular group together and flourish in an MMO environment.

But with the whole being locked in my house the whole time thing and the whole MMO gamers running another blogging festival thing, one would have thought that it was an excellent time to try and get into an MMO, right? I have a copy of Lord of the Rings Online just sitting around in Steam for some reason (I'm pretty sure I didn't buy it, maybe there was a giveaway at some point?), and then I hear they're running some kind of special event so that more areas are open to people who haven't bought all the DLC, so I caved and set steam to download.

22 GB! Even just a couple of years ago back in Australia that would be a deal-breaker right there. Not only would it have taken a week, it would have cost me a significant portion of my monthly download limit. Here in the land of cheap internet, though...sure, go on then.

That's....that's not good.

Turns out my virus protection, which I cannot deactivate, waited until the 22 GB was finished before deciding it was malware and deleting it. No problem, though, the downloader happily just started downloading the whole thing from the start again.

Luckily, I have a book I should be reading. But I sympathise with this orc.

Thankfully, by later in the evening this second attempt has successfully downloaded, and this time it isn't being identified as a virus. Not sure what's changed, but at least my whole LoTRO adventure hasn't been cut off before it could even begin.

But wait...there's more!

Another hour or so of tea and crosswords as various patches and supplementary bits and pieces are downloaded, and...is that a start button? I was beginning to think they didn't exist! If this is the life of an MMO gamer, I'm already pretty confident that it's not for me.

I feel your pain, buddy.

Still, we're in and can finally make a character. I make a dwarf (because of course I do) minstrel (because of course I do) called Wolomur. He has a moustache and a barrel chest and won't be taking any of that nonsense from you, laddie! Middle-Earth, here we come.

I like to think that he does his own embroidery.

Pity there's no time left for actually playing the game tonight, but there's always another chance next time around. Unless they release another patch and I have to download the whole thing all over again.

Off to the Blaces

Now that April proper has begun, accompanied with the usual practical joke hullabaloo (don't get me started on the NYT crossword today) it feels like a good time to give a little bit of a run-down of the sort of thing that I'm planning for the next month on the Leaflocker. Not that things are likely to change from the usual nonsense all that much, but I'm hoping that by clearly announcing my goals I have maybe half a chance of meeting them. After all, this is the first blogging festival for a while which hasn't been interrupted by moving house or being on holiday, so I actually have half a chance of getting some things done around here. Not a big chance, but a chance nonetheless.

Maybe this is the year we
finally beat 2016's postcount.

Firstly, I'm planning on spending a solid block of time of about one cup of tea writing here on the blog (People measure days in teacups, right?). That time might not actually see any post come out of the end of it, but hopefully things will move in a generally publishable direction. I haven't got the discipline to set aside a specifically allotted consistent time each day, but I get the feeling I'll be able to fit it in if I try. I'm sort of hoping for 31 posts out of these five weeks, which would leave me with four cheat days, but as long as I manage a post for each weekday I'll be happy (a boy's gotta rest some time, after all). 

Mondays will continue to feature our Great Conversation, a process that I continue to enjoy as much as I ever have, even though it continues to attract absolutely no interest from the readership. They do say that one should blog for themselves, though, so it's staying. If my track record is anything to go by I won't actually be able to get one of those posts up each week, so hopefully on the off-weeks I'll be able to talk a little about some of the non-classic stuff that I've been able to read during the week when I was actively avoiding Mr. Plato.

Tuesdays will be board games content, a run down of the weekly games night as well as any other thoughts on the topic that I might have. This last week was a bit of a bumper issue and I doubt I'll be able to go on that long each time, but hopefully we'll be able to dive a little deeper into one particular game or aspect of games instead of just skimming over the surface.

Wednesdays should see the return of the Monday History quiz, the feature that I most wish that I had the willpower to pump out every week, as it seems to be a hit with a small but vocal contingent of the readership and could really benefit from actually appearing on a regular basis. As evidenced by the fact that this post is here instead of a quiz I don't always find it an easy one to get out on a schedule, though, so we're likely to need a backup option to fill in the gaps when the creative juices run slow.

Thursdays will be to day for my video games stuff, pandering to the Blaugust crowd a little and generally spending some time trying to think a little more critically about the medium that I seem to spend a truly ridiculous amount of my time on lately. I'm still picking up new games on a pretty regular basis, and hopefully having to plan something weekly will help me to branch out into something new instead of loading up yet another round of CounterStrike.

[Here I took a slight break to play Counterstrike. My team won 16-14, coming through on the CT side of Mirage despite my best efforts to lose it with some very erratic sniper play in the critical moments]

Fridays are currently earmarked for Special Features, which never bodes well, but thankfully I have a couple of relatively timeless posts on the backburner from last Blaugust that I should be able to serve up relatively easily if nothing new comes to mind. I'm hoping this slot will allow an outlet for a little more creative expression in some form, but like many folks I'm finding that creative spark pretty difficult to come across at the moment, so we'll see how we go.

Saturdays are Crossword days. I'm vaguely intending to have a new cryptic up every now and then, but the idea of one each week seems improbable verging on impossible, so it might be a recap of a crossword that I particularly enjoyed during the week. Or it might be a day off. I'm pretty happy with the idea of having weekends off of anything approaching work, so if I'm not enjoying the process Saturdays will just be empty.

Same goes for Sundays. If I have something to get off my chest about either the quarantine situation or about church or prayer stuff I'll put them here (so if you're not interested if hearing more aobut either of those two potential triggers, consider this a free pass to just not drop by a day each week), but I think Sundays will probably be dormant except in the unlikely event of us actually working up some kind of backlog here at Leaflocker HQ. Stranger things have happened, but not that many.

So that's a wrap of the sort of nonsense you're likely to find around these parts this Blapril. Any given day's scheduled programming might be either supplmented with or completely thrown out in favour of some kind of blog response post like I mentioned a couple of days ago, but at least I've stuck down my general plans. Now all I have to do is keep to them.

Now what was tomorrow, again? Video games? Guess I'd better get ready for that with a little CounterStrike...