David Gillon

Our Tuesday night pub quizzes have restarted, so I have been in a pub for the first time since early March. Counting chemists, barbers and garage I think that's the fourth commercial establishment I've been in in almost six months. It's been so long I had to remind myself which way to go to drive there!

Quiz was much the same, pub not so much - tables booked in advance, temperature taken on arrival, test and trace info recorded before you can sit down, and then table service rather than bar. There was hand sanitizer outside the door as well, but I missed that - and was wearing gloves anyway, so there was no point. No one at the bar was fine by me as I was sitting closest to it, which means other than the two friends I was with - both retired, so not mixing much - the closest other person was 3-4m away. That I can live with. It used to get extremely crowded when the cathedral choir arrived after practice, but I guess they're not practicing at the moment.

We didn't finish in the top three - we may have missed by one point, but given we're two people down on our normal (they're seriously vulnerable, so still isolating) that wasn't too bad. We'll be back in a fortnight. -- ETA, ah, bugger, no we won't -- gatherings of more than six banned from tomorrow

I've spent a quite ridiculous amount of time playing Ark: Survival Evolved since installing it on Saturday. And I've now progressed from the sad status of two-legged dinosaur kibble through hunter-gathering and have reached the technological heights of farming. I'm not quite ready for actual veggie farming, so I've taken the easy option and started farming dodos.

The island where Ark takes place, particularly the beaches, is rife with dodos. They may be the basis of the food chain (I'm not sure quite how realistically modelled Ark's food chain is, as one of the notes from previous explorers you find from time to time pointed out, food chains where the carnivores outnumber the herbivores two to one just don't work under our rules of physics). You quickly come to understand why the actual dodo became extinct - you can hit them over the head and all they'll do is squawk piteously and try to waddle away, hit them a few more times and they fall over ready to be harvested.

The whole game works on a harvesting/crafting mechanic - gather wood, berries, flints, or bits of dead animal, and use them to build yourself a shelter, or better tools, or as your next meal - it's basically Bear Grylls in action. My initial home base was a thatched hut, then it became a thatched hut with a wooden panic room inside (that blasted dilophosaurus that killed me seconds into the game was a very persistent problem), and now it's a large wooden bungalow with a forge and the start of a farm. You can take it all the way up to SFnal hardware, but I'm far more interested in the lower tech survival option. In fact there's an official mod with precisely that function and I'll probably go that way if I restart.

Initially I was surviving on cooked dodo (and coelocanth and trilobite), but you can also tame dinosaurs (and other creatures), and the dodo is supposed to be one of the easiest beasts to tame. Some beasts can be tamed just by feeding them, but the dodo is too stupid for that, so it's time to brute-force things, in this case by hitting it over the head with a blunt object until it falls over unconscious. Then you can stuff it full of berries and wait for it to wake up. As it surfaces from unconsciousness it will eat the berries, and when it wakes up you have a friend for life (though that life may be short-lived as it has, quite literally, the survival instincts of a dodo). This is how taming works for the majority of creatures on the island, but I have a sneaking suspicion it may be rather more fraught for cases along the lines of 'first subdue your T-rex'.

Once you've tamed your dinosaur (or oversized pigeon with the survival instincts of a tranquilized lemming) you can manipulate their behaviour in various ways, including one which is essentially 'mate now'. And that's where farming comes in. Intially I just tried having them follow me around, but when one of my first tames got into a squabble with a compsognathus (aka a compy, aka a 2-foot tall annoying little shit of a dinosaur) and lost, I realised that wasn't going to work, especially as the follow option doesn't initiate the mating behaviour. So I needed a farm, and now my nice little bungalow built around the banyan tree (poor initial site planning), has a dodo-coop tagged on the back. I've got about ten dodos in there (unfortunately rather too many males) and they spend most of their time wandering around with a little heart symbol over their heads meaning they're looking for lurve. And shortly after that you'll find a dodo egg on the floor (also dodo crap, which you can turn into fertiliser). You do also get fertilised eggs, but so far I've only found dead infants, apparently you need to pretty much feed newborns on the spot, as they're too stupid to feed themselves like the adults. If I get rid of most of the males, and add a few more females then I'll be pretty much self-sufficient food wise.

On reflection, tacking the coop on the back of the house was a bad idea, dodos gobble. Dodos in lurve gobble continuously. The other sound I'm having problems with is related to my infestation of triceratops (there are at least three around my little bay). All the larger creatures seem to have an earthshaking mechanic in your close proximity (I'm not a fan of camera wobble at the best of times), and that's got a very low-frequency sound coming out of the sub-woofer that quite literally makes me feel ill. I ended up building fences across the beach on both sides of my house in order to keep them far enough away I'm not bothered by that. I need to have a look and see if there is an option or mod that turns it off entirely. My next thing to try is probably taming one of the triceratops, I already have a triceratops saddle curtesy of the goodie-filled supply pods that drop out of the sky, but I suspect it isn't going to be quite as easy to knock unconscious as the dodo. Once I have a ride I'll be much better placed for wandering the jungle in safety, and having a pack mule will make gathering supplies for building much more efficient - I'm already using a raft to cut down back and forth journeying). Ultimately I can see this going two ways: a nice, calming game I can dip into whenever I want to, or so damned addictive I end up deleting it from my computer for my own good.

In other news, I've successfully recovered my desk chair, though I've yet to tidy up all of the corners as I ran out of glue. On the plus side it actually looks nearly as good as it did originally, which considering I ended up wrapping one sheet of faux-leather over a shape complex enough they used at least 9 pieces in the original is surprising. It'll look even better when finished. On the negative side I need to repair one of the arms - the cushioned pad has a wooden base with a metal nut glued to it, I overtightened the bolt and popped the nut off, so time to get the super-glue out. And the arms also turn out to have two subtly different length bolts to everything else on the chair, so that arm will have to remain sidelined while I go through the other dozen bolts one at a time to find where I used the longer ones in error.

I did a pub quiz with friends on Tuesday night, and we won handily. As someone stepped in whenever I tried to buy a round (and I'm reliant on other people for the getting, so poorly placed to argue), I ended the night £12:50 in profit. The others do that quiz regularly, and say it's usually not that much, they just had a particularly good turn out on Tuesday. I'm sort of stepping into a dead friend's shoes to bring their numbers up;  I was invited to start doing it a couple of years ago and I did it a few times, but if we all happened to show up then there would be too many for a team and someone would have to be left out, so I decided to stop going. That's sadly no longer an issue. OTOH it was good to see everyone in happier circumstances (last time we met was the funeral) and I also bumped into my old German teacher, who I hadn't seen in ages, plus we won, of course.

Recent reading: Cherryh's Destroyer, Pretender and (currently just getting started with), Deliverer, the third trilogy of the Foreigner series. Bren Cameron, aka the Lord of the Heavens, aka the Paidhi-Aiji (translator to the Aiji, and the one human truly fluent in Atevi), together with the aged Aiji-Dowager Ilisidi and her great grandson, completely seven, absolutely not eight year old Cajeiri (it's a numbers thing) return home to the Atevi homeworld after two years away to find there was a coup eight months ago, the shuttle fleet is grounded, the space-station surviving by a whisker and the Aiji (Cajeiri's father, Tabini) is missing, potentially dead. Cue Bren spending two books wondering 'Is it my fault? It's my fault, really, isn't it?'; tiny, frail Ilisidi turning into the force of nature that scared everyone so much she was twice passed-over for Aiji; Cajeiri having to show he has the stuff to be Aiji in his own right; and Bren's bodyguards Banichi and Jago metaphorically rubbing their hands together in glee that they're back to the kind of problems that they, as senior members of the Assassin's Guild, know exactly how to deal with.

I did a quiz night with friends on Saturday (which we won, he says smugly) and there was one moment of humour that's worth repeating.

Questionmaster: "What is the largest species of lizard?"

Instant voice from the back: "Trump!"

The table across from us was particularly raucous - they turned up with takeaways and a bottle of gin - and only got louder as the night went on and the level of gin went down. That prompted one of my friends who knew them to note that mass would be interesting in the morning - apparently the two being noisiest were the cathedral's Director of Music and the organist.

There were a couple of answers I was dubious enough about to check up when I got home, and it turns out I was wrong to say John Wayne played the lead in Genghis Khan, it was Omar Sharif. But I wasn't wrong by much, he played Genghis Khan in The Conqueror. And I guessed right that they'd go with Copernicus as the first person to propose the heliocentric hypothesis, but I was right to think it was Aristarchus of Samos, who only beat him by 18 centuries (admittedly I couldn't remember the 'of Samos'). One of my friends was particularly upset that she couldn't remember the name of the Welsh Assembly's First Minister, because 'I'll get teased about it at work' - it wouldn't be an issue for most of us, but she works in the Constitutional Affairs team at the Cabinet Office. Whoops....

It's about a year since I last did a quiz, we used to do them much more regularly. The only drawback to this one was that there were really too many people in too small a space, which made conversation difficult to impossible, but still an enjoyable night.