In the last year or so I have been getting into the darts. Seeing as I don’t own a dartboard, I’m forced to play in the pub. I have my preferred locations based on a loose set of criteria; quality of set up, choice of beer and general vibe. Encouraged by Boak and Bailey’s recent Substack, I've decided to jot some thoughts down, both for pubs I already visit frequently and for one-off adventures. So far I've only had friendly encounters with other darts players, including making friends I now play with on a regular basis.
Gary Anderson reacting to a dartboard after hitting a nine-darter.
Spotting a dartboard in a pub as I walk past will always mean a visit in the not-too-distant future. Similarly, spotting a dartboard in a film prompts me to point at it like Gary Anderson pointing at the board when he hit a 9 darter while warming up for the World Championship semi-finals this year. I intend this to be a long-running series, although I suspect they will vary greatly in style, length and frequency. Also note that the final rating is purely based on the darts set up and not the pub overall.
The Bell
The inaugural dartboard review is the Bell off Stokes Croft. I visit fairly frequently due to its proximity to the Cube cinema for pre or post film pints. That is, if I haven’t gone to the Hillgrove, which is a tremendous pub but has no dartboard so shouldn't really be mentioned. The Bell is the original in Sam Gregory’s Bristol pub empire (Bank tavern, Nova Scotia, Crown Tavern…). Each has a unique vibe, but the Bell stands apart from the rest, sitting much further towards the grunge/dive-bar end of the spectrum than the others. It regularly hosts jungle/DnB nights, and I was enjoying the selection of tunes on this visit. Here's a Spotify playlist of tracks my phone automatically identified.
A poor image of the Bell at night.
This visit was before a screening of Strongroom (which features a dartboard) in the Cube. I had a pint of Guinness which was immaculately poured (and in a nice clean glass the Krennmairs will be delighted to hear) however, I’m not qualified to review Guinness, only dartboards. I was also interested to see they had two Old Speckled Hens (Distinctive and Golden) on cask, both of which I sampled although one was during the post-film discussion where no darts took place. I’ve only ever had it bottled, and the golden ale tasted exactly like the bottled variety to me. I’ll leave it to the beer nerds to tell me if that’s expected or if my palate is too underdeveloped to detect the bottle conditioning.
A reassuring plaque confirming that perfect Guinness is poured here.
Finally, the dartboard itself, which is tucked away in a poorly lit corner behind the bar in the back room. The board itself is a decent-quality, if a little aged, Winmau Blade 6. From the damage to the surrounding cupboard the longevity of the board may be due to a large proportion of darts missing the target altogether. In the lingo these are known as carpentry darts.
The dartboard at The Bell, surrounded by extensive evidence of wayward throws.
However, the oche leaves much to be desired, there is no line marked, just a series of wobbly scratches in the floor. There’s also a low beam halfway along the oche, which is hard to avoid when aiming for tops, even for a short arse like me. Judging by the damage to the beam I’m not the only one having the issue.
The oche, such as it is: a collection of barely visible scratched lines.
All in all, I love my trips to the Bell, if there's nothing interesting on cask I know there will be a decent pint of Guinness, as well as a choice of stalwarts from local breweries such as Joy of the Sesh. However, the dartboard is definitely more of a practice board, more suited to games of round-the-clock or just trying to hammer the bullseye, rather than proper games of 501.
I introduced OTP bingo where I work, but I hadn’t considered how long it would take with numbers in the range 0-999. Luckily NumPy is very good at playing bingo, so I ran a few games to see how long it would take. You can see the code here
It’s going to be a while, 869 turns for the median player, but someone might get lucky. Out of 100000 games of OTP bingo the fastest winner was just 34 turns. However, the unluckiest player took 3384 goes. Note this is with a FREE cell in the middle of the card. The median number of logins to bingo without the FREE cell goes up to 907.
I was also interested to see how long OTP bingo takes if you only use 2 two digits, and how it varies with card size.
One Time Passcodes (OTPs) are very useful for keeping accounts secure, but tedious to enter repeatedly over the day. Add some fun to them with OTP Bingo!
The game is simple, every time you have to enter a few digits for your OTP check your bingo card for them. When you have filled out enough to complete a row or column shout BINGO as loud as you can. OTPs come in quite a few different flavours, but you should be able to adapt them to a good game of bingo using the script in this gist.
uv run --with reportlab bingo.py --help
usage: bingo.py [-h][--grid-size GRID_SIZE] [--max-value MAX_VALUE] [--total-cards TOTAL_CARDS] [--output OUTPUT]
[--add-free]
Generate OTP Bingo PDF cards.
options:
-h, --help show this help message and exit--grid-size GRID_SIZE
Size of the bingo grid (default: 5 for 5x5).--max-value MAX_VALUE
Maximum random number value (default: 999).--total-cards TOTAL_CARDS
Total number of bingo cards to generate.
--output OUTPUT Output PDF filename (default: otp_bingo.pdf).--add-free Add a FREE value to the middle cell if True and the bingo grid has an odd number side length
I'm not sure when I adopted orange lad as my mascot, somewhere around 2016, but I do get asked a lot of questions about him.
FAQs
What is that?
He goes by a few names (Mr Orange, Orange Min) but I call him orange lad.
Where is he from?
He originated on a Zbrush central forum on 05.07.2005, where a user was just messing around to learn how to use the software. Then about 10 years later he took off as a minor internet meme. There is also a load of lore around lads and their subcultures, but it's all too gen Z for me.
Why?
I don't know
Lad Gallery
I have been abusing ChatGPT's free credits to create orange lad images
For the past couple of years I have been running a music league at work. All of the hard work is done by the music league app, all I have to do is come up with 10 themes and set up the timing schedule for players to submit songs and vote. Then, each week, players have two days to think of and submit a song for the weeks theme (e.g. song with a colour in the title), and five days to vote on the playlist of songs. Players get 10 upvotes and 3 downvotes to to assign to the songs as they see fit, although these numbers can be configured by the league admin. The rounds in the latest league were:
🤝 Best song with feat.
🐯 Song with an animal in the title
👩🤝🧑 Bands with siblings song
🥫 Best product placement/use of a brand name
🍦 Answer the question with a title: Why are you sticky?
🪦 Least appropriate for a funeral
⛵ Sea themed
💃 Just dance: songs that instruct the listener to dance
♻️ “In the style of” (cover that’s not in the original genre)
💎 Deep cut - lesser known song from a big band
At the end of 10 weeks the winner is declared, and they receive the pass the aux cable trophy:
I also crunch a load of stats for the music league. The code for the stats can be found here, and includes voting correlation matrices, genre correlation between players, song ages etc…
