Blog – Page 49

2024 in Videogames

Duration 12:02

Podcast Version

This post is also available as a podcast. Listen here, download for later, or subscribe wherever you consume podcasts.

My life affords me less time for videogames than it used to, and so my tastes have changed accordingly:

I appreciate games that I can drop at a moment’s notice and pick up again some other time, without losing lots of progress¹.
And if the game can remind me what it was I was trying to achieve when I come back… perhaps weeks or months later… that’s a bonus!
I’ve a reduced tolerance for dynamically-generated content (oh, you want me to fetch you another five nirnroot do you? – hard pass²): if I might only get to throw 20 hours total at a game, I’d much prefer to spend that time exploring content deliberately and thoughtfully authored by a human.
And, y’know, it has to be fun. I rarely buy games on impulse anymore, and usually wait weeks or months after release dates even for titles I’ve been anticipating, to see what the reviewers make of it.

That said, I’ve played three excellent videogames this year that I’d like to recommend to you (no spoilers):

Horizon: Forbidden West

I loved Horizon: Zero Dawn. Even if this review persuades you that you should play its sequel, Forbidden West, you really oughta play Zero Dawn first³. There’s a direct continuation of plot going on there that you’ll appreciate better that way. Also: Zero Dawn stands alone as a great game in its own right.

Aloy, the protagonist of the Horizon games, wearing Mark of Pride face paint and red-stained Quen Deadeye armour, stands at sunset in a jungle environment. — *Horizon* gives a lot to love, from a rich world and story, immersive environments, near-seamless loading, excellent voice acting, and a rewarding difficulty curve. But perhaps all are second-place to what a kickass character the protagonist is.

The Horizon series tells the story of Aloy from her childhood onwards, growing up an outcast in a tribal society on a future Earth inhabited by robotic reimaginings of creatures familiar to us today (albeit some of them extinct). Once relatively docile, a mysterious event known as the derangement, shortly before Aloy’s birth, made these machines aggressive and dangerous, leading to a hostile world in which Aloy seeks to prove herself a worthy hunter to the tribe that cast her out.

All of which leads to a series of adventures that gradually explain the nature of the world and how it became that way, and provide a path by which Aloy can perhaps provide a brighter future for humankind. It’s well-written and clever and you’ll fight and die over and over as you learn your way around the countless permutations of weapons, tools, traps, and strategies that you’ll employ. But it’s the kind of learning curve that’s more rewarding than frustrating, and there are so many paths to victory that when I watch Ruth play she uses tactics that I’d never even conceived of.

Aloy aims a precision longbow at a Tremortusk, an elephant-like machine, in a sunny desert environment. — *Horizon: Forbidden West* is like *Zero Dawn* but… more. More quests, more exploration, more machines, more characters, and more of the same story, answering questions you might have found yourself thinking during the prequel. But it’s not just more-of-the-same.

Forbidden West is in some ways more-of-the-same, but it outgrows the mould of its predecessor, too. Faced with bigger challenges than she can take on by herself, Aloy comes to assemble a team of trusted party members, and when you’re not out fighting giant robots or spelunking underwater caves or exploring the ruins of ancient San Francisco you’re working alongside them, and that’s one of the places the game really shines. Your associates chatter to each other, grow and change, and each brings something special to the story that invites you to care for each of them as individuals.

The musical score – cinematic in its scope – has been revamped too, and shows off its ability to adapt dynamically to different situations. Face off against one of the terrifying new aquatic enemies and you’ll be treated to a nautical theme, for example. And the formulaic quests of the predecessor (get to the place, climb the thing…), which were already fine, are riddled with new quirks and complexities to keep you thinking.

And finally: I love the game’s commitment to demonstrating the diversity of humanity: both speaking and background characters express a rarely-seen mixture of races, genders, and sexualities, and the story sensitively and compassionately touches on issues of disability, neurodiversity, and transgender identity. It’s more presence than representation (“Hey look, it’s Sappho and her friend!”), but it’s still much better than I’m used to seeing in major video game releases.

Thank Goodness You’re Here!

If ever I need to explain to an American colleague why that one time they visited London does not give them an understanding of what life is like in the North of England… this is the videogame I’ll point them at.

A short, somewhat minigame-driven, absurd to the point of Monty Python-ism, wildly British comedy game, Thank Goodness You’re Here! is a gem. It’s not challenging by any stretch of the imagination, but that only serves to turn focus even more on the weird and wonderful game world of Barnsworth (itself clearly inspired by real-world Barnsley).

Playing a salesman sent to the town to meet the lord mayor, the player ends up stuck with nothing to do⁴, and takes on a couple of dozen odd-jobs for the inhabitants of the town, meeting a mixed bag of stereotypes and tropes as they go along.

Presented in a hand-drawn style that’s as distinctive and bizarre as it is an expression of the effort that must’ve gone into it, this game’s clearly a project of passion for Yorkshire-based developers Coal Supper (yes, that’s really what they call themselves). I particularly enjoyed a recurring joke in which the player is performing some chore (mowing grass for the park keeper, chopping spuds at the chippy) when the scene cuts to some typically-inanimate objects having a conversation (flowers, potatoes) while the player’s actions bring them closer and closer in the background. But it’s hard to pick out a very favourite part from this wonderful, crazy, self-aware slice of Northern life in game form.

Tactical Breach Wizards

Finally, I’ve got to sing the praises of Tactical Breach Wizards by Suspicious Developments (who for some reason don’t bother to list it on their website; the closest thing to an official page for the project other than its Steam entry might be this launch announcement!)⁵, the team behind Gunpoint and Heat Signature.

The game feels like a cross between XCOM/Xenonauts‘ turn-based tactical combat and Rainbow Six‘s special ops theme. Except instead of a squad of gun-toting body-armoured military/police types, your squad is a team of wizards in a world in which magical combat specialists work alongside conventionally-equipped soldiers on missions where their powers make all the difference.

By itself, that could be enough: there’s certainly sufficient differences between all of the powers that the magic users exploit that you’ll find all kinds of ways to combine them. How about having your teleport-capable medic blink themselves to a corner so your witch’s multi-step lightning bolt can use them as a channel to get around a corner and zap a target there? Or what about using the time-manipulation powers of your Navy Seer (yes, really) to give your siege cleric enough actions that they can shield-push your opponent within range of the turret you hacked? And so on.

But Tactical Breach Wizards, which stands somewhere between a tactical squad-based shooter and a deterministic positional puzzle game, goes beyond that by virtue of its storytelling. Despite the limitations of the format, the game manages to pack in a lot of background and personality for every one of your team and even many of the NPCs too (Steve Clark, Traffic Warlock is a riot). Oh, and much of the dialogue is laugh-out-loud funny, to boot.

The writing’s great, to the extent that when I got to the epilogue – interactive segments during the credits where you can influence “what happens next” to each of the characters you’ve come to know – I genuinely flip-flopped on a few of them to give some of them a greater opportunity to continue to feature in one another’s lives. Even though the game was clearly over. It’s that compelling.

And puzzling out some of the tougher levels, especially if you’re going for the advanced (“Confidence”) challenges, too, is really fun. But with autosaves every turn, the opportunity to skip and return to levels that are too challenging, and a within-turn “undo” feature that lets you explore different strategies before you commit to one, this is a great game for someone who, like me, doesn’t have much time to dedicate to play.

So yeah: that’s what I’ve been up to in videogaming-time so far this year. Any suggestions for the autumn/winter?

Footnotes

¹ If a game loads quickly that’s a bonus. I still play a little of my favourite variant of the Sid Meier’s Civilization series – that is, Civilization V + Vox Populi (alongside a few quality-of-life mods) but I swear I’d play more of it if it didn’t take so long to load. Even after hacking around it to dodge the launcher, logos, and introduction, my 8P+4E-core i7 processor takes ~80 seconds from clicking to launch the game to having loaded my latest save, which if I’m only going to have time to play three turns is frustratingly long! Contrast Horizon: Forbidden West, which I also mention in this post, a game 13 years younger and with much higher hardware requirements, which takes ~17 seconds to achieve the same. Possibly I’m overanalysing this…

² This isn’t a criticism of the Elder Scrolls games specifically, but of the relatively-lazy writing that goes into some videogames that feel like they’re using Perchance to come up with their quests, in order to stretch the gameplay. I suppose a better example might have been the on-the-whole disappointment that was Starfield, but I figured an Elder Scrolls reference might be easier to identify at-a-glance. Fetch-questing 100 tonnes of Beryllium just doesn’t have the same ring to it.

³ In fact, if you’re trying to consume the Horizon story as thoroughly as possible and strictly in chronological order, you probably should read the graphic novel between one and the other, which covers some of the events that occur between the two.

⁴ Did you ever see the alternate ending to Far Cry 4, by the way? If you did, you might appreciate that a similar trick can be used to shortcut Thank Goodness You’re Here! too…

⁵ They’re also missing a trick by using the domain they’ve registered, wizards.cool, only to redirect to Steam.

Note #24342

If the most useful thing I achieve this Bank Holiday Monday will have been to make it easier to post short geotagged notes from my mobile to my blog (and Mastodon), it will have been a success.

This has been a test post. Feel free to ignore it.

Dan Q found GC4PYCF Thames Path – Floodproof

This checkin to GC4PYCF Thames Path - Floodproof reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

Excellent cache, which I was pleased to observe has the largest conceivable container possible for its hiding place: nice one! I love a good treetop cache!

Once I’d free the right tree, getting up was relatively easy: the limb next over from the one mentioned in the hint provided a good launching-off point and a short scramble later I was sat at height with the container in hand. Getting down, though, proved more challenging as I slipped on a low bough and plummeted to the ground!

Aside from my pride, the biggest injury was to my thumb, which nicked some kind of fierce plant on the way down and is bleeding as I type this. Still 100% a worthwhile effort to find a great cache, so an FP awarded.

Now I’ve gotta start jogging again if I’m to have any chance of catching up to my partner Ruth, who I’ve joined in this leg of her effort to walk the entire Thames Path (I swear I didn’t just agree to tag along for the caching opportunities!).

Dan Q found GC8NW44 Thames Path – 91-DIVOC

This checkin to GC8NW44 Thames Path - 91-DIVOC reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

Not convinced they my route through the 2m nettles to reach the host was optimal, but I made it through to this decent sized cache relatively unscathed. TFTC!

Dan Q found GC4QAER Howard

This checkin to GC4QAER Howard reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

Found without difficulty but at W 001°14’16.7886″, N 51°40’12.5960″: the cache description provides a good clue though so it was easy to get back on track. TFTC

Dan Q wrote note for GC4QAED Leonard

This checkin to GC4QAED Leonard reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

Skipped this one as I’m still playing catchup to the rest of my group and wasn’t interested in a long search. Many previous finders note that the coordinates are significantly off but I couldn’t see anybody posting alternates. Maybe next time I’m down here!

Dan Q found GC4QAE6 Bernadette

This checkin to GC4QAE6 Bernadette reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

After a brief overshoot – too excited to finally be catching up to Ruth and the rest of my squad! – doubled back to find this easy location. Cache was lying on the floor which I assume isn’t the right hiding place, so I returned it to the V. While running from the last cache I’ve dropped my writing implement somewhere, so have photographed the (almost pristine!) logbook as proof that I actually found it. This has been my favourite of this mini-series so far; FP awarded for the enjoyable container theming if nothing else!

Dan Q found GC4QADE Penny – bonkers for conkers

This checkin to GC4QADE Penny - bonkers for conkers reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

No difficulty with this QEF; title clue plus a little botany had me stop in exactly the right place. And the tall nettles weren’t any risk to me with long trousers! TFTC.

Dan Q did not find GC4QADB Sheldon

This checkin to GC4QADB Sheldon reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

No luck here. Couldn’t spare more than a little while to hunt without Ruth and the rest of the Thames Path Source-to-Mouth party getting too far ahead but spent that time getting thoroughly nettled. They’re fierce around here! Maybe another time.

Dan Q found GC2W97E Messing about by the river

This checkin to GC2W97E Messing about by the river reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

Found after a brief search while accompanying my partner Ruth on the latest leg of her effort to (by instalments) walk the entire length of the Thames from its source to its mouth. Initially looked in the wrong place but once I was willing to brave the nettles and hack my way off the footpath the cache location became obvious. A bit damp, but serviceable. TFTC!

Dan Q found GC4QADR Raj

This checkin to GC4QADR Raj reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

Another QEF down this stretch of the Thames Path. Having to jog to catch up with my party now! Cache container camouflage slightly damaged but still plenty good for concealment so long as it’s stored the right way up! TFTC, nice one!

VaultPress to the Rescue

OMG VaultPress Jetpack Backup to the rescue.

One of the best Internet people drew me a picture and when I replied to it, it got scrambled. 😱

But even though I had to modify core WordPress columns to store drawings, the backup respected that and I was able to restore it.

I used to pay for VaultPress. Nowadays I get it for free as one of the many awesome perks of my job. But I’d probably still pay for it because it’s a lifesaver.

So… I’m A Podcast

Duration 10:25

Podcast Version

This post is also available as a podcast. Listen here, download for later, or subscribe wherever you consume podcasts.

Observant readers might have noticed that some of my recent blog posts – like the one about special roads, my idea for pressure-cooking tea, and the one looking at the history of window tax in two countries¹ – are also available as podcast.

Why?

Like my occasional video content, this isn’t designed to replace any of my blogging: it’s just a different medium for those that might prefer it.

For some stories, I guess that audio might be a better way to find out what I’ve been thinking about. Just like how the vlog version of my post about my favourite video game Easter Egg might be preferable because video as a medium is better suited to demonstrating a computer game, perhaps audio’s the right medium for some of the things I write about, too?

But as much as not, it’s just a continuation of my efforts to explore different media over which a WordPress blog can be delivered². Also, y’know, my ongoing effort to do what I’m bad at in the hope that I might get better at a wider diversity of skills.

How?

Let’s start by understanding what a “podcast” actually is. It is, in essence, just an RSS feed (something you might have heard me talk about before…) with audio enclosures – basically, “attachments” – on each item. The idea was spearheaded by Dave Winer back in 2001 as a way of subscribing to rich media like audio or videos in such a way that slow Internet connections could pre-download content so you didn’t have to wait for it to buffer.³

Here’s what I had to do to add podcasting capability to my theme:

The tag

I use a post tag, dancast, to represent posts with accompanying podcast content⁴. This way, I can add all the podcast-specific metadata only if the user requests the feed of that tag, and leave my regular feeds untampered . This means that you don’t get the podcast enclosures in the regular subscription; that might not be what everybody would want, but it suits me to serve podcasts only to people who explicitly ask for them.

It also means that I’m able to use a template, tag-dancast.php, in my theme to generate a customised page for listing podcast episodes.

The feed

Okay, onto the code (which I’ve open-sourced over here). I’ve use a series of standard WordPress hooks to add the functionality I need. The important bits are:

rss2_item – to add the <enclosure>, <itunes:duration>, <itunes:image>, and <itunes:explicit> elements to the feed, when requesting a feed with my nominated tag. Only <enclosure> is strictly required, but appeasing Apple Podcasts is worthwhile too. These are lifted directly from the post metadata.
the_excerpt_rss – I have another piece of post metadata in which I can add a description of the podcast (in practice, a list of chapter times); this hook swaps out the existing excerpt for my custom one in podcast feeds.
rss_enclosure – some podcast syndication platforms and players can’t cope with RSS feeds in which an item has multiple enclosures, so as a safety precaution I strip out any enclosures that WordPress has already added (e.g. the featured image).
the_content_feed – my RSS feed usually contains the full text of every post, because I don’t like feeds that try to force you to go to the original web page⁵ and I don’t want to impose that on others. But for the podcast feed, the text content of the post is somewhat redundant so I drop it.
rss2_ns – of critical importance of course is adding the relevant namespaces to your XML declaration. I use the itunes namespace, which provides the widest compatibility for specifying metadata, but I also use the newer podcast namespace, which has growing compatibility and provides some modern features, most of which I don’t use except specifying a license. There’s no harm in supporting both.
rss2_head – here’s where I put in the metadata for the podcast as a whole: license, category, type, and so on. Some of these fields are effectively essential for best support.

You’re welcome, of course, to lift any of all of the code for your own purposes. WordPress makes a perfectly reasonable platform for podcasting-alongside-blogging, in my experience.

What?

Finally, there’s the question of what to podcast about.

My intention is to use podcasting as an alternative medium to my traditional blog posts. But not every blog post is suitable for conversion into a podcast! Ones that rely on images (like my post about dithering) aren’t a great choice. Ones that have lots of code that you might like to copy-and-paste are especially unsuitable.

Dan, a microphone in front of him, smiles at the camera. — You’re listening to Radio Dan. 100% Dan, 100% of the time.(Also I suppose you might be able to hear my dog snoring in the background…)

Also: sometimes I just can’t be bothered. It’s already some level of effort to write a blog post; it’s like an extra 25% effort on top of that to record, edit, and upload a podcast version of it.

That’s not nothing, so I’ve tended to reserve podcasts for blog posts that I think have a sort-of eccentric “general interest” vibe to them. When I learn something new and feel the need to write a thousand words about it… that’s the kind of content that makes it into a podcast episode.

Which is why I’ve been calling the endeavour “a podcast nobody asked for, about things only Dan Q cares about”. I’m capable of getting nerdsniped easily and can quickly find my way down a rabbit hole of learning. My podcast is, I guess, just a way of sharing my passion for trivial deep dives with the rest of the world.

My episodes are probably shorter than most podcasts: my longest so far is around fifteen minutes, but my shortest is only two and a half minutes and most are about seven. They’re meant to be a bite-size alternative to reading a post for people who prefer to put things in their ears than into their eyes.

Anyway: if you’re not listening already, you can subscribe from here or in your favourite podcasting app. Or you can just follow my blog as normal and look for a streamable copy of podcasts at the top of selected posts (like this one!).

Footnotes

¹ I’ve also retroactively recorded a few older ones. Have a look/listen!

² As well as Web-based non-textual content like audio (podcasts) and video (vlogs), my blog is wholly or partially available over a variety of more-exotic protocols: did you find me yet on Gemini (gemini://danq.me/), Spartan (spartan://danq.me/), Gopher (gopher://danq.me/), and even Finger (finger://danq.me/, or run e.g. finger blog@danq.me from your command line)? Most of these are powered by my very own tool CapsulePress, and I’m itching to try a few more… how about a WordPress blog that’s accessible over FTP, NNTP, or DNS? I’m not even kidding when I say I’ve got ideas for these…

³ Nowadays, we have specialised media decoder co-processors which reduce the size of media files. But more-importantly, today’s high-speed always-on Internet connections mean that you probably rarely need to make a conscious choice between streaming or downloading.

⁴ I actually intended to change the tag to podcast when I went-live, but then I forgot, and now I can’t be bothered to change it. It’s only for my convenience, after all!

⁵ I’m very grateful that my favourite feed reader makes it possible to, for example, use a CSS selector to specify the page content it should pre-download for you! It means I get to spend more time in my feed reader.

Even More 1999!

Spencer’s filter

Last month I implemented an alternative mode to view this website “like it’s 1999”, complete with with cursor trails, 88×31 buttons, tables for layout¹, tiled backgrounds, and even a (fake) hit counter.

One thing I’d have liked to do for 1999 Mode but didn’t get around to would have been to make the images look like it was the 90s, too.

Back then, many Web users only had graphics hardware capable of displaying 256 distinct colours. Across different platforms and operating systems, they weren’t even necessarily the same 256 colours²! But the early Web agreed on a 216-colour palette that all those 8-bit systems could at least approximate pretty well.

I had an idea that I could make my images look “216-colour”-ish by using CSS to apply an SVG filter, but didn’t implement it.

But Spencer, a long-running source of excellent blog comments, stepped up and wrote an SVG filter for me! I’ve tweaked 1999 Mode already to use it… and I’ve just got to say it’s excellent: huge thanks, Spencer!

The filter coerces colours to their nearest colour in the “Web safe” palette, resulting in things like this:

Plenty of pictures genuinely looked like that on the Web of the 1990s, especially if you happened to be using a computer only capable of 8-bit colour to view a page built by somebody who hadn’t realised that not everybody would experience 24-bit colour like they did³.

Dithering

But not all images in the “Web safe” palette looked like this, because savvy web developers knew to dither their images when converting them to a limited palette. Let’s have another go:

Dithering introduces random noise to media⁴ in order to reduce the likelihood that a “block” will all be rounded to the same value. Instead; in our picture, a block of what would otherwise be the same colour ends up being rounded to maybe half a dozen different colours, clustered together such that the ratio in a given part of the picture is, on average, a better approximation of the correct colour.

The result is analogous to how halftone printing – the aesthetic of old comics and newspapers, with different-sized dots made from few colours of ink – produces the illusion of a continuous gradient of colour so long as you look at it from far-enough away.

The other year I read a spectacular article by Surma that explained in a very-approachable way how and why different dithering algorithms produce the results they do. If you’ve any interest whatsoever in a deep dive or just want to know what blue noise is and why you should care, I’d highly recommend it.

You used to see digital dithering everywhere, but nowadays it’s so rare that it leaps out as a revolutionary aesthetic when, for example, it gets used in a video game.

All of which is to say that: I really appreciate Spencer’s work to make my “1999 Mode” impose a 216-colour palette on images. But while it’s closer to the truth, it still doesn’t quite reflect what my website would’ve looked like in the 1990s because I made extensive use of dithering when I saved my images in Web safe palettes⁵.

Why did I take the time to dither my images, back in the day? Because doing the hard work once, as a creator of graphical Web pages, saves time and computation (and can look better!), compared to making every single Web visitor’s browser do it every single time.

Which, now I think about it, is a lesson that’s still true today (I’m talking to you, developers who send a tonne of JavaScript and ask my browser to generate the HTML for you rather than just sending me the HTML in the first place!).

Footnotes

¹ Actually, my “1999 mode” doesn’t use tables for layout; it pretty much only applies a CSS overlay, but it’s deliberately designed to look a lot like my blog did in 1999, which did use tables for layout. For those too young to remember: back before CSS gave us the ability to lay out content in diverse ways, it was commonplace to use a table – often with the borders and cell-padding reduced to zero – to achieve things that today would be simple, like putting a menu down the edge of a page or an image alongside some text content. Using tables for non-tabular data causes problems, though: not only is it hard to make a usable responsive website with them, it also reduces the control you have over the order of the content, which upsets some kinds of accessibility technologies. Oh, and it’s semantically-invalid, of course, to describe something as a table if it’s not.

² Perhaps as few as 22 colours were defined the same across all widespread colour-capable Web systems. At first that sounds bad. Then you remember that 4-bit (16 colour) palettes used to look look perfectly fine in 90s videogames. But then you realise that the specific 22 “very safe” colours are pretty shit and useless for rendering anything that isn’t composed of black, white, bright red, and maybe one of a few greeny-yellows. Ugh. For your amusement, here’s a copy of the image rendered using only the “very safe” 22 colours.

³ Spencer’s SVG filter does pretty-much the same thing as a computer might if asked to render a 24-bit colour image using only 8-bit colour. Simply “rounding” each pixel’s colour to the nearest available colour is a fast operation, even on older hardware and with larger images.

⁴ Note that I didn’t say “images”: dithering is also used to produce the same “more natural” feel for audio, too, when reducing its bitrate (i.e. reducing the number of finite states into which the waveform can be quantised for digitisation), for example.

⁵ I’m aware that my footnotes are capable of nerdsniping Spencer, so by writing this there’s a risk that he’ll, y’know, find a way to express a dithering algorithm as an SVG filter too. Which I suspect isn’t possible, but who knows! 😅

Easy Socialising

This weekend I invited over a bunch of our old university buddies, and it was great.

We still didn’t feel up to a repeat of the bigger summer party we held the year before last, but we love our Abnib buddies, so put the call out to say: hey, come on over, bring a tent (or be willing to crash on a sofa bed) if you want to stay over; we’ll let the kids run themselves ragged with a water fight and cricket and football and other garden games, then put them in front of a film or two while we hang out and drink and play board games or something.

14 adults, 8 children, and a dog stand on/in front of a garden climbing frame: Dan is in the centre. — Every one of these people is awesome. Or else a dog.

The entire plan was deliberately low-effort. Drinks? We had a local brewery drop us off a couple of kegs, and encouraged people to BYOB. Food? We threw a stack of pre-assembled snacks onto a table, and later in the day I rotated a dozen or so chilled pizzas through the oven. Entertainments? Give the kids a pile of toys and the adults one another’s company.

We didn’t even do more than the bare minimum of tidying up the place before people arrived. Washing-up done? No major trip hazards on the floor? That’s plenty good enough!

I found myself recalling our university days, when low-effort ad-hoc socialising seemed… easy. We lived close together and we had uncomplicated schedules, which combined to make it socially-acceptable to “just turn up” into one another’s lives and spaces. Many were the times that people would descend upon Claire and I’s house in anticipation that there’d probably be a film night later, for example¹.

I remember one occasion a couple of decades ago, chilling with friends². Somebody – possibly Liz – commented that it’d be great if in the years to come our kids would be able to be friends with one another. I was reminded of it when our eldest asked me, of our weekend guests, “why are all of your friends’ children are so great?”

A group of adults stand around on a patio, socialising. — It’s not *the same* as those days long ago, but I’m not sure I’d want it to be. It is, however, fantastic.

What pleased me in particular was how relatively-effortless it was for us all to slip back into casually spending time together. With a group of folks who have, for the most part, all known each other for over two decades, even not seeing one another in-person for a couple of years didn’t make a significant dent on our ability to find joy in each other’s company.

Plus, being composed of such laid-back folks, it didn’t feel awkward that we had, let’s face it, half-arsed the party. Minimal effort was the order of the day, but the flipside of that was that the value-for-effort coefficient was pretty-well optimised³.

A delightful weekend that I was glad to be part of.

Footnotes

¹ That Claire and I hosted so many social events, both regular and unplanned, eventually lead us to the point that it was the kind of thing we considered whenever we moved house!

² Perhaps at the Ship & Castle, where we spent a reasonable amount of our education.

³ I’m pretty sure that if I’d have used the term “value-for-effort coefficient” at the party, though, then it’d have immediately sucked 100% of the fun out of the room.