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...

Games Night in the age of Coronavirus

My Monday night table tennis club has been cancelled the last few weeks (since if you can't shake hands after a good match there's really not a lot of point to the thing), but thankfully our old college's weekly board games night has gone online via Discord and as old stalwarts they invited us along. I've missed the games and the people a lot since we moved, and reconnecting with them has been one of the much-needed highlights of the couple of weeks.

Discord is an excellent platform for this kind of group (5-10 people) to get together in a voice or text chat and play some games. We've been doing thrice-weekly catch-ups over tea and coffee and daily meetups to do the crossword together using the handy screen-sharing feature, and while it's not quite like seeing each other in person, it does a good job of simulating the collegial atmosphere of the common room.

Monday nights have proved a bit of challenge in terms of finding things that will suit everyone, but below are a few things that we've tried the last few weeks and how they've been received, presented both in the hope of sparking some ideas among things you could do remotely to stay in touch with your friends and family, and also to fish for any good ideas from among the refreshing mountain lake that is the Leaflocker readership's collective brains.

Jackbox and Drawful

Week one featured the old games night classics of Jackbox and Drawful, which aren't exactly boardgames but are the kind of interactive party games that are close enough if you squint. They take a decent player count with the added advantage of only the host having the own the game, and allow people to exercise their creativity, but they do require everyone to be both watching a stream and their own devices and are always plagued with network dropouts at inopportune moments. Drawful 2 is currently free on steam and I'd say it's definitely worth grabbing, even if personally these games aren't really my cup of tea, since they inevitably descend into either dick-jokes or in-jokes and once they do there's nothing that can be done but hope no-one asks to play again.

Hanabi

We're big fans of the co-operative 2-5 player solitaire-like card game Hanabi, so finding a good implementation of it online was a definite bonus. hanabi.live seems to tick all the boxes pretty well, letting everyone see everything that they need to one screen and allowing for all sorts of weird and wacky variant rules once you get the basics down. Personally I like it a little bit better than the implementation that's available on Board Game Arena, as like many of the games on that otherwise excellent site it struggles for screen real-estate, but either way you can't go too wrong. BGA can be a little tricky to get rolling with, but it has a bunch of good implemetations of good games available for free, and even more for those willing to shell out £2 a month for a premium account. It does seem like their servers are getting hammered pretty hard at the moment, so I'm not sure that they're all that reliable just now.

Codenames

Codenames is always the goto for the start of a night, when you've got no idea how many folks to expect and might have people come in and out quickly. I don't really remember what board games nights were like before it. but couldn't imagine a meet without it now. While we couldn't get the discord bot that said it could play the game on our server to work properly, we were able to use Kodenames and were pretty pleased with the results, though there are a lot of  other options out there too. The words in this one seem a lot trickier than the ones in the official game, but not completely unmanageable.

Carcassonne

Since we've been trying to keep costs down for people rather than require everyone to invest in standalone apps, we went looking for some slightly meatier options that could be streamed from one "games master" computer and didn't rely on hidden information, which led us naturally to another old favourite, Carcassonne. BGA has a version of this in their premium offering, but I was pleasantly surprised to find a well-programmed version available via Tabletop Simulator, which I've owned for ages and is a platform that I have generally found to be too much effort to bother with. Having everyone give me directions while I placed pieces for them worked pretty well, even if we had to manually score the inns and cathedrals expansion where it wasn't implemented. Today the Carcassonne app, as well as a buch of other Asmodee titles, was on a really good special on Steam, so I picked that up so that we can do the same thing on the legit version next time we try to play.

Istanbul

We played Istanbul the same way using the finely-crafted app they've got available on Steam for that one, too, and it worked very well. The only difficulty was the slight lack of surprise given by being able to see each others' cards, but since if we were sitting around the table I would have had to explain them all and give them away anyway, nothing was really lost. The worst thing that I have to say about this app is that it's a bit sad that they're not planning on adding the mocha expansion, because personally I think that adds a lot to the game.

We've had a good time replicating our little games group online, and it's definitely been something to look forward to in a period where the different days have tended to blur into each other a bit.

I have a few other tricks up my sleeve for future weeks, including this somewhat precarious double-webcam arrangement, but I guess I'll have to wait and see how those ones go. Let me know if you can think of any good ones that I've missed, or if you've secretly programmed the internet's first actually good 500 server and have been holding out on me, as it seems like we'll be meeting remotely for a while and I'm going to need all the board-gaming ammunition I can get.

Leaflocker Origins

What's this? Two posts in one day? What's going on?

Two of my not-yet-clearly-ennumerated aims for this Blapril are to interact a little more with the other Blaugustines and to try to have a little more variety in my posts, without abandoning too many of the 'regular' features. Thus I hope to add the occasional short discussion posts in response to other folks' blogs here and there where the mood takes me. This has the additional benefit of covering me in terms of numbers if I miss a day here and there, just in case I decide that I want to shoot for the shiny rainbow badge.

Today, Belghast talked a little about naming his blog, so I thought I'd take the opportunity to share the origin story of the blog here.

The name Leaflocker dates the origin of the blog to the height of my crossword puzzling days around 2009/2010. It's traditional in cryptic crossword circles, at least in the UK, to pick a nickname for yourself as a crossword creator, presumably so people are unsure where to send the hate mail. The name that I picked was Linnaea Leaflock. The name is made up of two plants, since I, like every crossword puzzle fanboy, was a bit of a fan of the grandaddy of the cryptic puzzle, Araucaria, who took his name from the monkey puzzle tree.

Linnaea is the scientific name of the Twinflower, being vaguely reminiscent of the Terry Pratchett character Twoflower and also reflecting the fact that my first name is Thomas. Also, it sounds like a girl's name, and keeping with my general theme of playing female characters when I can that seemed appropriate.

Leaflock is the name of the Ent also known as Finglas, who along with Fangorn and Fladrif are the oldest of the Ents living in Tolkien's middle Earth. Finglas is described as being so sleepy as to be nearly tree-ish, and is thus is a bit of a slow and 'dim ent'.

When the time came to make a blog, Leaflocker seemed like a natural fit, as the blog was meant to be a place to put my pages of nonsense, a locker for the leaves, as it were, and here we are. Since then a company has started to use the name to sell mesh designed to keep leaves out of gutters, but I maintain that I had the name first and refuse to change it. I've never really been one to try and keep a consistent brand anyway, as evidenced by the range of different names that I go by, online as in real life, so I don't mind too much.

GC XXVI: The proof will carry conviction

The whole 'weekly blog post with homework' format of our ongoing Great Conversation project is a strange beast. Usually I end up delaying the blog post because I need more time to read the books, but this time around I had the opposite problem; despite finishing the 'weekly' readings in mid-November, I've found the actual writing of the post itself to be the bit that's slowing down the process, and now here we are at the end of March, with the readings in the distant past, and if I was grasping for something interesting to say about them back then I have Buckley's Chance now. So, apologies for the limited review section, but it's time to get this show back on the road. It's almost Blapril, after all.

Unfortunately, the Adelaide eBooks site that I've been using as the main source for most of the links throughout the series has now disappeared from the internet, so all of the past links are now irretrievably lost. I guess that's what happens when your seven-year project starts hanging around past its used-by date. This also means that we have to revert to the project Gutenberg translations, which in many cases are inferior, but in the absence of learning ancient Greek and Latin I suppose that they'll have to do. More importantly, though, it means that I can't easily link directly to chapter headings any more unless Gutenberg have included direct links, which is about 50/50 so far. To get around this I'd hope to be using the Text Fragment Anchor flag available in the current version of Chrome. If you use Chrome you would can go here to turn that feature on for now to allow you to scroll straight to nominated places in the document, which wouldn't help readers on other browsers, but would have been a start. Unfortunately, my experiments with getting it to actually work have hit a dead end, and so I've abandoned it for now in the interests of actually getting this post up, so for now we're flying blind and if you want to read the chapters I'm reading I'm afraid you're going to have to do your own scrolling.

The Week That Was:

The History of Herodotus

Book VIII

As Herodotus winds down somewhat anticlimactically after the highs of book seven, I'm mostly just left with the general impression that it's really a wonder that the Greeks ever listen to oracles about anything at all, given how many examples we've been given lately of them being just straight up paid to lie about things. You'd have thought they'd learn something at some point.

Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe

Chapters XVIII-XX

If the reader was looking for some kind of conclusion out of the last few chapters of Crusoe, they're in for a rude shock. Once the mutineers have been dealt with, Crusoe returns home having learnt more or less nothing. Of course this is all just set up for the next book, and this being pretty much the first English-language novel the rules of how to write them aren't exactly codified yet, but I want closure, dammit!

All in all, I enjoyed reading Robinson Crusoe. I feel like it's aged pretty well when you consider just how old this novel is, but I think it falls just a little bit short of inclusion in my own personal canon. And I have absolutely no interest on reading anything at all about Crusoe's further adventures.

Les Miserables by Victor Hugo 

Volume III - Book IV

The various characters of the ABC all seem like a lot of fun, but as usual when it comes to French names I have absolutely no hope of keeping them all straight when it comes to the action. Hopefully Hugo will hold my hand a little when we eventually come to that stuff, or I am going to be so lost.

Republic of Plato

Book I

It's a whole new book, but Socrates continues to do Socrates things. As usual we're supposed to think he's so clever, but like Thrasymachus I find myself wanting to bop him on the nose. Rather smartly. If the rest of the Republic goes on like this it's going to be a long book.

The Sand Reckoner by Archimedes

Perfectly transparent

I found this one surprisingly easy to grasp and Archimedes chain of logic relatively easy to follow in comparison to Euler's, and was pleased to find that I could more or less able to nod along with all of his steps, so I was perplexed to find out that Archimedes model of the solar system was way, way off. Despite having a pretty good guess at the size of the Earth, it comes down one of his base assumptions being an order of magnitude off causing the measurement of the distance to the sun to be comically, tragically underestimated, but there's nothing wrong with the logic. Give me Archimedes over Socrates any day, is basically what I'm saying.

Some Numbers: 

This week we passed 3000 pages read during the project, which feels like a pretty significant milestone for someone who really hasn't read an awful lot in the last few years. It doesn't count all the Harry Potter fanfiction, either.

Pages last week: 106
Pages so far: 3021

Readings for Week XXVII

The only new book on the list this week is a return to Shakespeare with the Tempest, otherwise we're jsut continuing to power on through with bite-sized chunks of Hugo, Plato, Dicken, Bacon and our last dose of Herodotus. There's a few mid-sized readings and a couple of teeny-tiny ones, hopefully there's a little bit of something for everyone, so do join me by picking up a book or two ready for this time next week. Unless you only like things written since 1900, I guess, if so, you're bang out of luck.

Les Miserables by Victor Hugo 

Volume III - Book V (12 pages)

#non_gbww #imlit #novel #french

Republic of Plato

Book II (17 pages)

#gbww #pandt #philosophy #greek

The Tempest by William Shakespeare

(25 pages)

#gbww #imlit #play #english #oneshot

The History of Herodotus

Book IX (32 pages)

#gbww #mands #history #greek

The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens

Chapters XIV & XV (18 pages)

#non_gbww #imlit #novel #english

Sphinx by Francis Bacon

(2 pages)

#ggb #pandt #essay #english #oneshot #short

What a difference a month can make

For my day job, I work as the building and bookings administrator for my local church.

Four Sundays ago, about 160 members of our church met together as usual in our building on the main road of our town for worship and kids groups followed by a chat over a cup of tea. I visited the church every day, both to give access to the various community groups that use the building and to work in the office.

Three Sundays ago, we had a big squirty box of hand-sanitiser on the door, a couple of members who'd just come back from trips to Asia stayed at home, but it was more or less business as usual. A couple of my co-workers attended our weekly staff meeting by Skype, but I was still around and letting people in and out of the building. Most of the people I talked too couldn't find toilet paper anywhere, but were just trying to get on with life as usual.

Two Sundays ago, we asked people who had someone unwell in their house, who were in a vulnerable group or who didn't feel comfortable coming to church to stay at home. We had about 70 people there and struggled to get enough adults to care for the various kids groups during the service, shared communion handed out by tongs, and tea and coffee after the service was carefully doled out by someone in kitchen gloves. We cancelled all large gatherings in the building, but some community services judged essential continued, perhaps not as usual, but at least they happened.

Last Sunday, the church building was closed on a Sunday morning, and people gathered around laptop screens around the city at 10:30am to watch a service that had been prerecorded by the musicians and speakers in the church building over the course of the week. At tea and coffee time we met together in small groups via Zoom or by phone from our respective lounge rooms. The building closed entirely, and I set up the table downstairs as my office desk, even though it's not exactly clear what my job is these days when we the building doesn't really need a lot of administering.

This Sunday, the YouTube service was spliced together out of bits and pieces recorded in different members homes. Some members contributed songs, others prayers, others preached or led communion made of whatever bread and liquids members had in their houses (our consisted of pepper crackers and apple cider). It has been a rollercoaster of change, but I've been greatly encouraged by how well people have been adapting to some significant changes, especially by how well some of the elderly and more technologically challenged have leapt right in. It might no look that much like church looked just a month ago, but it still looks a lot like church, and in a time of upheaval and uncertainty, that's a pretty big deal.

Let's wait and see what the next month throws at us.

In Blapant Disregard of Tradition...

Yes, the people that brought you Blaugust have done it again and renamed a month with wanton abandon, to their own doubtless nefarious ends.

In this time of mass cancellations and a sudden emptiness in all of our social calendars, the good folks that bring us the annual blogging festival hitherto known as Blaugust have chosen to bring forward this year's event to fill the gap caused by all this social distancing and mandatory quarantining that's going on. Thus I'll be planning to get back to something approaching a regular posting schedule for the month of April, which is something I was planning to do anyways (to be fair, I'm always planning on getting the Leaflocker rolling again, just with differing degrees of urgency;but at least this time I'll have some friends to bounce ideas off of and to be inspired by).

It's looking to be a quieter affair so far, with just over 20 participants signed up so far rather than the 70-odd that we had last year, but given the enormous wodge of time that attempting to keep up with reading all those blogs took out of my schedule (time that I was supposed to be packing to move house) maybe that's a good thing after all. If you're looking to fill your dates a little in this current climate let me encourage you to join us, as writing a regular blog is a rewarding activity and the Blaugustines (Blaprilites?) are a friendly and enthusiastic bunch.

I'm not quite sure what sort of things I'm likely to come out with during the month, but it's probably not going to be the MMO focused material of most of my comrades-in-blarms. Since this leopard doesn't change his spots except under duress, though, the chances are high that it will be the same old Leaflocker miscellany of rambling about books and board games. Personally, I'm hoping for some good crossword content too.

I hope you'll join me during the month, either by joining the blogfest or just by stopping by and leaving a comment or two as I go along, as a little bit of encouragement goes a long way. If you'd like to join the festival proper, do check out Belghast's post on the topic for more details and info about the discord channel and other ways that you can make the month a little more interactive.

Until next time, keep on Blarching on.