[Lib] Here, have a mug of hot chocolate.

I'm not seething (see above) but was wondering why Darren was. Here's something lighter. During tonight's big football match David 'Spooner' Pleat uttered these words: THE SIGHT IS IN END. It'll be in next week's Colemanballs section of Private Eye with the name of any one of a thousand people who spotted it, possibly mine.

It is done...Bwaaaaahahahahahaahhcoff coff hack HURGH!!!

They think its all over - and it is.

At least let it start!!!

Personally I liked "Hampster" which is overdue a resurrection in a different form...

Actually that game died without filling a single page, so I take it all back. Screw the Hamster idea. Ermm. I mean...

To giggle at a mention of "sword" and "pork" in a game? If so, I am a wrong un! ...and I dreamt...

[Pave] I still haven't got over Wymo's move in that game...

{Tuj} I know!!! Fancy slipping like that! :)

Just a quick note to say that although I don't post as much as I used to (due to work commitments, and more), I would be very sad to see you close down!

I came for the limericks, but stayed for the Clerihews.
MC5 has a nice comfy feel for me. I like that it's not intimidatingly big. I don't much care for mcios or Orange. I think kill votes or timers would be a nice addition. If the games rotated more swiftly, us newcomers wouldn't feel as shy about trying to create them. *shy shy*

As befits my profession, I shall have to do some statistical analysis on the corpus available to me to see if it's possible to devise a heuristic that identifies the 'running out of steam' point.

(rab) You could get a heuristic off an old steam engine but you'll need a big spanner.

I would post more. But I'm just not amusing enough. *sigh*

"I Woke Up From The Strangest Dream
Whence all but I had fled
When I woke up I found out why:
I was already dead."

Just something that came to me.

[Raak] Very nice!
The game in fact shares its title with a song by the band "Liam Frost and the Slowdown Family", who I saw earlier this year supporting the wonderful Elbow. It's not my favourite of their songs, but it inspired the recursive dream game.

The next game to be started shall be Game 100 here at MC5! Any ideas how we should mark such an occasion?

[Tuj] Sorry, that's what happens when I browse but not visit the Chat Game.

< goes and sits on the norty step >

[Inkspot] Took me a while to figure out what you meant :P and there was I thinking I was being premature suggesting that!

It looks like we've just bought a flat. The much-vaunted Scottish system is enormously frustrating at the early stages, as each property is essentially sold via blind auction. But now we're in a good position because we can pull out if the survey reveals anything unpleasant, or we can reduce our offer, or whatever, but the seller can't sell to anyone else, or decide they're not selling after all. Whee!

[rab] How exactly does that system work from the seller's point of view, then? Is there something that could stop you from dropping your offer down to £10, for instance?

Yes, they could simply refuse.

...and then the seller has to weigh up the relative pros and cons of accepting a lower offer than the original one, or putting the place back on the market. In our case, I don't anticipate any problems with the survey - but it's nice to know that we can pull out if the surveyor says the place is about to fall down, but they can't suddenly decide they're not selling to us after all.

Actually, I now understand we haven't quite reached that stage yet. The seller now has to agree in writing, so until we get that it could all be orrf.

Just a (necessarily) brief note to inform that I have broken a couple of bones in my left hand, so I might find myself not posting very much for a few days. I'm always surprised at how typing one-handed reduces one's speed by so much more than 50%, and how sore a broken bone can be.

Bad luck Phil. Won't ask how you got it, and hope it heals soon.

[Phil] You do seem to be 'going throught the wars' as we used to say. Poor you. So it's spaghetti for the next fortnight...

Blimey o'trousers! I would never have thought that having a baby would take up quite as much time as it does! I mean yes - they need 24 hour care, but who would have thought that it actually ment 24 hours being awake to look after them!!! He's been a gem up until a couple of days ago when he decided to go on 1 hour gaps between feeds!!! They grow up so fast! Anyway - it's why I have been scarce recently!

Been out of the morniverse for a while due to work commitments (setting up my own business) and generally being hectic, but getting back into it. Delighted to see MC5 overhauled with some fresh games. Yippee!

Well, that was more complicated than anticipated. Looks like the surveyor actually did some surveying (contrary to horror stories I've heard elsewhere) and picked up on some things that warranted a closer look, and so we had to send someone up to clamber around on the roof (with most buildings here being three or four storeys, it's more of a skill than it sounds). Turns out it's nothing too serious, although we will need to do a bit of work when moving in. As it happens, the scope for downward offering was limited by virtue of the next offer down being quite close to ours - so we ran the risk of the seller saying "Well, in that case we'll offer it to the next bidder"; turns out that things aren't quite as simplistic as you might first imagine.

I do wonder how much loaves of bread would cost if they were sold by blind auction, though.

They'd go mouldy by the time the auction was completed.

(Darren) Hard, too. A week-old baguette is an effective lightweight version of a baseball bat.

Incidentally, I should probably mention that the place is on a Crescent in Morningside. But not, sadly, Morningside Crescent: you have to go to Aberdeen to find one of those.

The current games on mc5 seem a bit slow moving. Perhaps its time for a couple of new ones. Any ideas?

Something easy to join in with please...
But no; no specific ideas. I am part of the problem, not part of the solution.
Incidentally, against all my expectations I just found out I passed all bar one module of the second year of my degree... I just feel like telling people that, 'cos I really wasn't expecting to.

Yay, well done Knobbly
New games it would be nice to kill off another of the current games but have tried and failed. I do hope Pave has not set the killer move of Around the Python Laugh-in to something cryptic and unwinnable.

It would appear he did. Shall I set it to the normal, or just quietly shunt it below the line. Slow movement here I think is a side effect of Dunx's festival of crescent.

I was trying to send it on its way as I had an idea for a guesssing game but would have a finite life. I can understand the need for a quick game for players to dip into when they are browsing and this game would not in all likelihod not be one of those.

The proposed game is a crossword where players can be either compiler or solver or even both. A 15x15 grid with 1A completed or blank with just the clue, solve the clue give the right answer, next player sets the next clue (cryptic or straightforward). After that the rules become "elusive". Does the crossword have to be symetrical? does it get filled in like a scrabble board with one clue leading off the next till all the blanks are symetrical and agreed upon? If the grid is blank how do we know whether it is 5A or 7A?

The would start something like this

	A	B	C	D	E	F	G	H	I.	J	K	L	M	N	O
1	1C	E	L	L
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
12
13
14
15

Would anyone be interested in this type of game and is it worth rab shunting off Around the Python Laugh-in to make room?

[Inkspot] Having to reproduce that grid each time kills the game instantly. It would be an utter pain in the arse to edit that each time a word was added (and when does it get updated? after every guess? each new word?), and the chance of screwing it up would be very high. (Note how many mistakes have been made just counting backwards in the Celerity CDs game! And note how hard it is to get certain participants to realise they've been getting the rules wrong.)

If you want a cryptic crossword clue guessing game, I'd strongly recommend doing it as was done before, with people submitting and guessing clues as they felt like it, with no grid.

I think, incidentally, activity on all three sites was waning even before the Orange festival, although that has made it more obvious. We're just not getting the same number of participants these days.

Apologies, incidentally, if there's an acerbic note in all that, I'm just generally pissed off about a lot of stuff today.

I agree with your points about the problems of updating and my greatest fear of solutions not fitting previuos moves and having to be redone. But I needed feedback like that so as not to make a complete prat of myself by just setting up the game with all of it's woolley thinking. There are other types of cryptic games already played on this server, but I wanted one that had a finite life span.
There is still an empty game slot.

Ooh. That's interesting. A new game has appeared in the wrong place...

Right, that's sorted; and the end-game trigger for the Python game has been set to the usual.

[Darren] Someone needs to do a good, solid corpus-based statistical study on activity rates in the Morniverse. I'm sure it would make a good PhD topic. My impression is also that activity has declined, but it was less busy than now when I first joined eight years ago (bloody hell, eight years). In those early days, fresh with the joy of discovery, i can remember having posted the last move in every game on York and MCiOS, and being quite at a loss for what to do next once I'd done it. Especially on weekends. In retrospect this was a bit rude, but I was immature and callow even in those days. :) I find that nowadays I tend only to post in a small subset of games and even when bored am unlikely to stray into the others. Maybe other people have gradually settled into a similar pattern.

[Projoy] I certainly have settled into a similar pattern, though I'd like to think that's because I'm less obnoxious now. I'd say the most concerning trend is the seeming lack of interest in the game of Mornington Crescent itself - our one token game here, for instance, is crawling along quite pitifully, and Long Games all over the Morniverse have slowed to the pace of Jeremiah Snail, the 1956 All-Dorking District Champion.

I think that posting only to one's favourite games is quite normal; it's certainly my style, but it depends on how creative I'm feeling at the time, if at all. A good rule of thumb is that if you have nothing interesting, witty etc to add to a game then wait till something more promising turns up. There is increasing verbal incontinence and rule-bending simply for the sake of posting something. The whole thing is beginning to annoy me, and not just me, as I know privately. We could also do without those who post under more than one name, which is deceitful and sad. One has already been outed and I have a very beady pair of eyes on another one.