The geohound and I walked over from Catbrook this morning “the long way” – over the hill and woods, finding a couple of caches along the way – to this cache.
From both the cache type and my GPSr’s map data I fully expected to find a post box here alongside the (decrepit) red phone box, but it’s nowhere to be seen! Has it perhaps been
removed?
The dog and I spent a little while looking for the promised postbox, without success.
In any case, the hint reassured me that I was in the right place and my geosense told me where to look. A disappointingly tiny cache container (where a larger one could have probably
been placed) was soon found, caked in mud, and replaced as-found.
The geopup and I absolutely chose the right time to come up here on this wintery morning. The sun’s ascent over the valley whenever we escape the cover of the woods is absolutely
spectacular.
Happy New Year! The geopup and I, on holiday from West Oxfordshire and staying nearby, came out for a morning walk in the ice and snow today.
Our little Frenchie’s tiny legs made the work of climbing the stiles on this path a little challenging, but with persistence we were treated to a wonderful view of the sun broaching the
horizon over the valley at the North end of School Wood.
Soon the cairn was in sight, and what a brilliant spot for a cache! Signed log, and dropped a travel bug that’s come
all the way from Texas to continue its journey. FP awarded for bringing us out this way.
Over the Christmas break I dug out my old HTC Vive VR gear, which I got way back in the Spring of 2016. Graphics card technology having come a long
way1,
it was now relatively simple to set up a fully-working “holodeck” in our living room with only a slight risk to the baubles on the Christmas tree.
For our younger child, this was his first experience of “roomscale VR”, which I maintain is the most magical thing about this specific kind of augmented
reality. Six degrees of freedom for your head and each of your hands provides the critical level of immersion, for me.
And you know what: this ten-year-old hardware of mine still holds up and is still awesome!2
The kids and I have spent a few days dipping in and out of classics like theBlu, Beat Saber, Job Simulator, Vacation Simulator, Raw Data,
and (in my case3)
Half-Life: Alyx.
It doesn’t feel too heavy, but this first edition Vive sure is a big beast, isn’t it?
I’m moderately excited by the upcoming Steam Frame with its skinny headset, balanced weight, high-bandwidth
wireless connectivity, foveated streaming, and built-in PC for basic gaming… but what’s with those controllers? Using AA batteries instead of a built-in rechargeable one feels like a
step backwards, and the lack of a thumb “trackpad” seems a little limiting too. I’ll be waiting to see the reviews, thanks.
When I looked back at my blog to double-check that my Vive really is a decade old, I was reminded that I got it in the same month at Three
Rings‘ 2016 hackathon, then called “DevCamp”, near Tintern4.
This amused me, because I’m returning to Tintern this year, too, although on family holiday rather than Three Rings business. Maybe I’ll visit on a third occasion in
another decade’s time, following another round of VR gaming?
Footnotes
1 The then-high-end graphics card I used to use to drive this rig got replaced
many years ago… and then that replacement card in turn got replaced recently, at which point it became a hand-me-down for our media centre PC in the living room.
2 I’ve had the Vive hooked-up in the office since our house move in 2020, but there’s rarely been space for roomscale play there: just an occasional bit of Elite: Dangerous at my desk…
which is still a good application of VR, but not remotely the same thing as being able to stand up and move around!
3 I figure Alyx be a little scary/intense for the kids, but I could be
wrong. I think the biggest demonstration of how immersive the game can be in VR is the moment when you see how somebody can watch it played on the big screen and be fine but as soon
as they’re in the headset and a combine zombie has you pinned-down in a railway carriage and it’s suddenly way too much!
4 Where, while doing a little geocaching, I messed-up a bonus cache’s coordinate
calculation, realised my mistake, brute-forced the possible answers, narrowed it down to two… and then picked the wrong one and fell off a cliff.
Back at the Rollright Stones fire New Year’s Day, per family tradition. This year the younger child counted 74, the elder 59. The curse that prevents
you counting the same number twice continues!
I’ve found myself, unusually, with enough free time for videogaming this Christmas period. As a result I’ve played – and loved enough to play to completion – not one
but two games that I’d like to recommend to you!
Egg
Egg, released last month by Terry Cavanagh, is a frustrating but satisfying 3D puzzle platformer playable for free on the Web or downloadable for a variety of platforms.
If Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy was a story about eggs instead of a man whose legs are stuck in a cauldron…
then it’d still be much harder than Egg, which almost never made me want to throw my computer out of the window.
It’s not quite a “rage game”, because it’s got copious checkpoints, but it will cause at least a little frustration as you perform challenging timed jumps to deliver each
of your six eggs to suitable nests hidden throughout the map. But I enjoyed it: it was never too hard, and it always felt like my hard work was paid-off in satisfying
ways.
I probably spent a little over an hour lost in its retro aesthetic, and was delighted to do so: maybe you should give it a go too.
Dispatch
You probably don’t need me to introduce you to Dispatch, from AdHoc Studio, because the Internet
has gone wild over it and rightly. Available for PlayStation and Steam, it’s a narrative-driven multi-pathed game that straddles both storytelling and strategic resource management
mechanics.
And it does the best job I’ve seen at making it feel like your choices matter since Pentiment. Perhaps
longer.
For the bits in-between the strategy layer, the quicktime events, and the dialogue choices, the game seamlessly slips into pre-rendered video that provides a best-in-class
“interactive movie” experience.
The story is well-written and wonderfully voice-acted: I’d have absolutely been happy to watch this “superhero workplace comedy” as a TV show! But the way it has you second-guessing
your choices and your priorities every step of the way significantly adds to the experience.
The basic gameplay is intuitive, lightweight fun, with a couple of surprises along the way… but it’s the story that’ll keep you hooked to the end of the eighth episode. There’s a good
chance this one’s going to win a ton of awards.
It only took about 8-10 hours of my time, spread over two or three sessions, but it’s very “episodic” so if – like me – you need to be able to dip in and out of games (when life gets in
the way) it’s still a great choice. And there’s some replay-value too: I’m definitely going to run through it a second time.
So if you’ve got at-least-as-much space for videogaming in your life as I do (which isn’t a high bar), those are my two “hot picks” for the season.
What about when you want to keep global styles out of your component, like with a third-party widget that gets loaded on lots of different pages?
I kind-of sort-of see the logic in that. But I also think wanting your component to not look like a cohesive part of the page its loaded into is weird and unexpected.
…
I so-rarely disagree with Chris on JavaScript issues, but I think I kinda do on this one. I fully agree that the Shadow DOM is usually a bad idea and its
encapsulation concept encourages exactly the kind of over-narrow componentised design thinking that React also suffers from. But I think that the rebuttal Chris picks up
on is valid… just sometimes.
When I created the Beige Buttons component earlier this year, I used the shadow DOM. It was the
first time I’ve done so: I’ve always rejected it in my previous (HTML) Web Components for exactly the reasons Chris describes. But I
maintain that it was, in this case, the right tool for the job. The Beige Buttons aren’t intended to integrate into the design of the site on which they’re placed, and
allowing the site’s CSS to interact with some parts of it – such as the “reset” button – could fundamentally undermine the experience it intends to create!
I appreciate that this is an edge case, for sure, and most Web Component libraries almost certainly shouldn’t use the shadow DOM. But I don’t think it’s valid to
declare it totally worthless.
That said, I’ve not yet had the opportunity to play with Cascade Layers, which – combined with directives like all: reset;, might provide a way to strongly
override the style of components without making it impossibly hard for a site owner to provide their own customised experience. I’m still open to persuasion!
A quick and damp scramble from the footpath above brought my right to the cache. SL, TFTC. Container seal has perished and logbook pretty wet; signable, but only barely.
Came out for a walk with my Ruth and the kids. While Ruth sat on a rock and the kids went with their uncle up to explore a small cave above, I
broke from the path to find this cache. QEF in the second host I looked at.
Took travel bug to move along, signed log, then went to retrieve the kids. TFTC.
But just sometimes, somebody asks2 “Yeah, but what does your birth
certificate say?”
My birth certificate says… Dan Q. Fuck the haters3.
It didn’t used to say “Dan Q”, but nowadays… yes, that’s exactly what my birth certificate says.
Y’see, I was born in Scotland, and Scottish law – in contrast to the law of England & Wales4
– permits a change of name to recorded retroactively for folks whose births (or adoptions) were
registered there.
And so, after considering it for a few months, I filled out an application form, wrote an explanatory letter to help the recipient understand that yes,
I’d already changed my name but was just looking for modify a piece of documentation, and within a few weeks I was holding an updated birth certificate. It was pretty
easy.
Somehow my modification does not make this Rick and Morty episode any more batshit-crazy than
it already was.
I flip-flopped on the decision for a while. Not only is it a functionally-pointless gesture – there’s no doubt what my name is! – but I was also concerned about what it
implies.
Am I trying to deny that I ever went by a different name? Am I trying to disassociate myself from my birth family? (No, and no, obviously.)
But it “feels right”. And as a bonus: I now know my way around yet another way for (some) Brits to change their names. Thanks to my work at FreeDeedPoll.org.uk I get an increasing amount of email from people looking for help with their name
changes, and now I’ve got first-hand experience of an additional process that might be a good choice for some people, some of the time5.
Footnotes
1 By the time you’ve got your passport, driving license, bank account, bills etc. in your
name, there’s really no need to be able to prove that you changed it. What it is is more-important anyway.
2 Usually with the same judgemental tone of somebody who insists that one’s “real” name is
the one assigned closest to birth.
3 If you’re zooming in on the details on that birth certificate and thinking “Hang on, he
told me he was an Aquarius but this date would make him a Capricon?”, then I’ve got news for you about that too.
4 Pedants might like to enjoy using the comments to point out the minority of
circumstances under which a birth certificate can be modified retroactively – potentially including name changes – under English law.
5 I maintain that a free, home-made deed poll is the easiest and cheapest way to change
your name, as a British citizen, and that’s exactly what FreeDeedPoll.org.uk helps people produce… and since its relaunch it does its processing entirely in-browser, which is totally badass from both a hosting and a user privacy perspective.
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