morwen | Reading

I can't believe I've been mudlarking on 87 days!

It was lunchtime and I arrived at the foreshore just before low tide. There were a group of people who walked up and underneath the wharf. I weren't sure if they were mudlarks, although at least one person was wearing gloves. The easiest way to spot other mudlarks is wellies.

Then after that there were a few tourists about. Much easier to spot, no wellies, no gloves, picking things up with their bare hands.

I stumbled across a very large but sadly no longer living crab.

Finds included a stripey stone, a piece of Metropolitan Slipware and a piece of a Bartmann jug.

skibbley

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

jack

General thoughts on large changes:
* Having three ages with only some things carried over between them actually works really well. If you do well on the victory tracks on one age it helps in the next age, but it's not impossible to catch up. And it's meaningful to pivot from science one age to conquering in another age to economics in another.
* Adding hexes to cities is simpler and meaningful, but confusing to people used to earlier Civ games. Each tile has a natural yield. When you grow the city (when you get a new pop) into that tile, it gets the appropriate improvement. Hexes adjacent to city tiles (within 3 of the centre) don't produce any yield but count as controlled by the city. (That's where you can expand into) Placing buildings also grows the city. Building count as urban hexes, they all need to be contiguous with the centre.
* Gaining influence spent for diplomatic actions works really well. It makes investing in diplomacy meaningful, for warlike civs as well as friendly ones. It makes a difference which civs you butter up, but you can't infinitely butter up a civ that doesn't like you. And influence is used during war to influence war exhaustion, so a more/less popular war makes a real difference.
* There is a soft cap on the number of settlements which I like. It's less runaway victory/failure than how many settlers you can build. But it's less dramatic when building a settler isn't A Big Deal.
* Independent powers make a bit more sense. There are villages which can be hostile (like barbarians) or can be befriended (when they become city states). Late in the age you get auto-hostile ones who act like barbarians. It feels more organic.
* I like mixing and matching leaders and civs, and mixing and matching different civs appropriate to the region between ages.
* They got rid of rock-paper-scissors units. But overall the balance of military seems fairly good. I really enjoy it when I have good unique milirary units, like horse archers (just always OP), or elephants with machine gun mounts (Siam FTW) 🙂
* Some of the victory tracks are really fun. In modern age, economic requires connecting a rail network and processing factory resources. In exploration age, military/expansion track rewards settlements in foreign lands, extra if conquered, extra if your religion, so it can reward a variety of play. But some feel more unfinished, just "do X amount of Y".

( Read more... )

squirmelia

A man asked me to take his photo next to some words he’d scrawled on the wall and said it was to send to his kids. I agreed as I hadn't put my gloves on at that point.

He thanked me and I walked on and overheard two people saying they couldn't believe they'd found a gold chain. Obviously I had got there too late!

The tide was coming in so I didn't have a lot of time.

Finds include:

A piece of glass that has gone kind of orange.

Melted medieval maltesers. I’m still unsure what these are really - suggestions on a Facebook group have included: grape shot, grinding media from a ball mill, iron ore.

(You need a permit to search or mudlark on the Thames foreshore.)

bella_luugosi

two log cabins with snow on the roofs in a wintery forest the text snowflake challenge january 1 - 31 in white cursive text

Challenge #12:

Make an appreciation post to those who enhance your fandom life. Appreciate them in bullet points, prose, poetry, a moodboard, a song... whatever moves you!

This is the closest I've got to deciding not to fill one of these prompts, because the dark side of appreciation posts is rejection sensitivity, and I have been there so many, many times, I hate being in situations where I have to decide who and what to appreciate and who and what not to mention. I always get it wrong and I always feel like I've hurt someone and I always, always drop back into the bit of my brain where no-one cares about me at all and I genuinely don't know if other people have that bit in their brain too, but I wouldn't want to contribute to anyone going there.

However. This project's got me nostalgic for The Way The Internet Was Back In My Day, and I want to appreciate a few people who apparently have never quite got to the point of writing me off. *g* I don't have a lot of people that I used to have on LJ because this is DW and my LJ is long gone, and I have done various iterations of "growing up" and moving away from fandom and fan spaces over the decades. I haven't even been in the habit of sharing when I do write fic here, which is going to change so I'll have to set up some filters for RL folk who just don't care. The me who found LJ and FF.Net in 2002 and the me of now have almost nothing in common, and I don't have any friends from school or university or childhood or 20s or 30s interest groups (apart from the TS) and I understand why, and I'm mostly sanguine about that now. And I am really bad at staying in touch with people.

And yet... and yet. There are

shirebound and

ancalime8301 and

rabidsamfan. I don't know when we first crossed paths but it's got to be 25-odd years ago. We were in a common fandom in the heady days when the LotR movies were coming out and it was frantic and brilliant and the internet wasn't evil yet. We wrote fic and exchanged plotbunnies and wrote drabbles that were exactly 100 words, and we were, I think for a lot of people, community that they struggled to find elsewhere. I've drifted through a lot of fandoms since then and had a lot of fallow periods where I haven't posted for literal years, and when I have it's just been to whine about how crap I'm feeling.

But you're still here.

Our interactions are different, because times change and interests drift, and I think I'm very bad at thinking things into the screen when you guys post but not actually hitting the keyboard, and I should work on that. But you're still there, and you care, and I think you understand when I'm enthusing about something that you really couldn't care less about, because fandom is its own language and you might not get the subject but you do understand the process. Maybe we don't swap writing challenges any more but you're there still there to enthuse when I'm enthusiastic and hug when I'm grumbling and I've only even met one of you in person! These are the oldest friendships I have, and there's something really beautiful about being able to retain that portion of a time that was so special - like catching the light of a star in a small glass bottle and taking it out to look at when things are dark.

<3

squirmelia

Low tide was early that Sunday, but a little later in Chelsea, so I headed there on the first train out.

I reached the foreshore around sunrise, but the skies were grey and cloudy. Just past Battersea Bridge, on the foreshore, you can see the remains of trees that once grew there, a forest that is now submerged.

I found:

The largest intact bottle I’ve found so far! It’s about 18cm tall.

United Glass Bottle Manufacturers) apparently used the UGB mark from 1913-1968.
The marks on the bottom look like they say:
H781
UGB
S 28

It possibly contained disinfectant.

Another rounded bottom bottle, perhaps from the 1880s?

A piece of glass that says “W & M”

A piece of glass that looks like it says “edon” but I am not sure of the letters before that.

A mysterious white cube object with patterns that has broken off something. Possibly a spaceship.

A handle from something (possibly bone)

A piece of glass from United Dairies.

A marble

Two and a half buttons.

Part of a ginger beer bottle by W&W. Western and Wolland (W&W) were in business in Bermondsey from about 1865 to 1896, making ginger beer and lemonade. As this bottle is stoneware as opposed to glass, it’s likely to be from the earlier period.

I likely walked past the premises where this was made on the day I found this sherd but didn’t realise at the time.

Part of a bottle that says London on it.

The base of a bottle that says:
London the property of Id (letters cut off)
Not to be refilled
Regd no
853390
B&Co

B&Co could be Bagley & Co.

A green bit of a Batey bottle.

Part of a torpedo (hamilton) bottle. It says on it “E&C” and possibly “waters” and “street”. It also says “rior” - Prior? It is dark green and quite thick glass. Thicker than the other bits of torpedo bottle I’ve found.

A Van Den Bergh & Co gin bottle fragment. This would have been from a Dutch gin bottle from around the 1870s.

(You need a permit to search or mudlark on the Thames foreshore.)

bella_luugosi

( Challenge #10: Big Mood (Board) )

( Challenge #11: Grant wishes )

Abigail Brady

Reading

Mudlarking 87

Ponderings on Queer

Civ VII reactions

Mudlarking 85 - Melted maltesers

Snowflake challenge prompt 12

Mudlarking 84 - submerged forests and a UGB bottle

Snowflake challenge prompts 10 and 11

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