Occasional Tales

 Well, not quite. I’ve given up on online racing for the moment. I’d still like my gold badge for doing 1,000 races, but the whole process was so depressing (literally, not metaphorically) that I had to stop and don’t know whether I’ll ever bother going back. Series 16 is effectively done. All the cars are unlocked. All the Fords were repeat screenings. The Renaults were repeat screenings, but from other Horizon games. Series 17 has four new cars. Sorry, two. The Nissan 400Z and some antique from 1965 which is re­mi­ni­scent of the Cosmo. The other two are repeats – the Toyota MR2 GT and the Mitsubishi Galant. Until this morning, I’d only ever raced the MR2 GT once in Horizon 4. I think the Galant is a decent dirt racer, but I’d probably opt for the Subaru Legacy. Cue two types of declarations because of this: a.) hysterical fan­boys declaring how marvellous this all is; b.) hysterical fanboys demanding to know why some equally shrug­worthy cars aren’t being included. Overall, Seri...

  Races, yes; custom, not really. Alongside Horizon Open, which is a series of different championships across different classes, is custom racing, which limits player to a single category (road, dirt, etc.) and class (B, A, S1, S2) for the entire time. I started trying this mode again last week because earlier attempts had failed due to lack of players. At first it was still the usual – unbalanced races with some cheater/exploiter vanishing off into the distance. Most of the races had small lobbies of three or four players, and where the racing was even, it was also clean. Yesterday afternoon I went back to custom racing and found the lobbies somewhat larger much to my dismay. I was right to be dismayed because it was just like Horizon Open with more shoving. And thus I didn’t manage to complete a single championship because I kept quitting races from being shoved. I have no desire to race against such filth. What made it worse was that it was maliciously done. I suspect that one p...

I got frustrated with the drivatars in Forza Horizon 5. It’s why after over a year I’m still prestige 4. In Horizon 4 after my first year of playing the game, I’d reached prestige 6, but I can see it taking to the middle of 2023 before I achieve the same feat in FH5. The drivatars in Horizon 5 are frustrating because they’re contrary. Much of the time they’re not that big a nuisance, but it can be demoralising when in some races they seem to leap from Highly Skilled to Unbeatable, leaving you trailing in their wake. I’ve done 15-lap circuit races in which I’ve followed the lead drivatar for the bulk of the race before finally managing to take the lead. In Horizon 4 I made progress against the drivatars. In Horizon 5 when I think it’s time to bump up the level of difficulty, I decide it’s not worth it as it’s likely to lead to more irritation. But I was also getting bored with the game regardless of the drivatars. Even though I only started the series with Horizon 4, I suspected that I ...

 I’m getting old? The management still manages to be annoying. There are now so few of us that we really can have our own classrooms. I expected to be left where I was, which is convenient, but instead will be relegated to the room which is the farthest from my office. I’ll mostly be teaching Year 11 as they repeat the course they did in Year 10 because we don’t have anything else for them and because we don’t have the teachers to offer IGCSE English Lit any longer. The whole department has been reduced to the two of us. At least the book will be different. If we had any sense, they ought to do Core in Year 10 and Extended in Year 11, but the management scrapped that perhaps because the pupils who used to do the Core exam were volunteers who had the wit to recognise their incompetence in English. But I’ll also be teaching half of Year 12 after discovering last year that I can’t teach and mark the EGP all by myself even with a reduced number of halfwits. Marking essay answers was ta...

 Nothing has changed. It’s quite some time since I last posted anything here mainly because nothing much has been bothering me that wasn’t being bothersome the last time I posted. To bring you up to speed, the management continues to be a complete ass. This asinine behaviour has got worse recently because of the finals. We’ve had a couple of incidents which provoked a most peculiar meltdown from the management (“We’re all doomed!”) and a bunch of petty additions to exam procedures. It’s the meltdown that has me wondering because it seemed to be a rather extreme reaction to situations we’ve had to deal with before. I’ve been wondering whether there was some other, external reason for it. We’ve also had meetings on an almost daily basis which seem to be a manifestation of the management trying to reinforce its power over us. The first one that was part of the meltdown was especially fraught and quite nasty at times. The implicit message seems to be that the management has authority o...

Can I get nothing right? I don’t like how things are going since Dr Bowman turned up. We’ve gone about four years into the past with the reappearance of adjustments to the exam marks after we (including me) recommended that such alterations be left till the very end, but now it’s all out in the open again. Madam Mao observed that we were doing something that no American university would ever see, and my preference is that we make such alterations in the background, but leave the public marks alone. I do have a formula for making such conversions, which works perfectly, but Dr Bowman insisted on reverting to conversion tables with marks of his own devising. Tables?! The reason why I devised a formula was because tables were sodding nuisances, although I also know how to circumvent the lack of a formula by using Excel to look things up for me. Bowman doesn’t listen to advice. In fact, he spends most of his time in his office, having no idea (as far as I can tell) what goes...

I’m still here. With the arrival of Dr Bowman, we seem to have a much more relaxed lord-of-the-manor than we’ve had in quite some time. While Colonel Blimp had his good points, he was clearly a rather angry person who had been made to stay for an extra year. There were apparently domestic problems as well, with Mistress Blimp having an ulterior motive. The Screeching Blimpette has also gone and with two empty desks, the office is mostly quiet. After years of loud Americans, it feels as if something is missing. Oh, that’s not to say we don’t have a bit of a laugh at times and can chat freely without worrying whether the Leprechaun might be in a stroppy mood, but some life has gone out of the place. We’re on our last two years of the IB programme, which does give the place an end-of-days feel to it. It’s also certain that the Sluggard will be leaving at the end of this year, and Lincoln Green is strongly inclining to depart. I myself don’t know whether I want to try and fi...