barrucadu's weeknotes

#415

2026-09-13T00:00:00Z

Books

This week I read:

The King of Elfland’s Daughter

I think this is probably the best “real-world fairytale” ever written. Lord Dunsany is great at this sort of writing (as aptly demonstrated in his more fantastical stories, which themselves inspired Lovecraft’s dreamlands), and The King of Elfland’s Daughter takes that style of writing but grounds it just enough to fit in some nonspecific part of fairytale-England. Another great book along the same lines is his The Blessing of Pan which I’m now feeling a craving to re-read.

Roleplaying Games

Hot Springs Island

This week felt a little bit unfocussed. The players wandered around the island some, properly met the ogres for the first time (and learned some of their backstory due to a good reaction roll), and had their first hostile encounter with the salamanders. Really, they should have had several hostile salamander encounters by now, I’d just been putting it off for no good reason. But at least they’ve got the picture now that not everyone is friendly if you just talk to them.

Miscellaneous

I set up a little home gym in my conservatory back in July. I wasn’t using the space for anything, and I’ve periodically tried to get fitter but always fallen out of the habit, so I thought why not give it another try but add on a bit of sunk cost fallacy for motivation?

Well, seven weeks in it appears to be working. I’ve been following the Hybrid Calisthenics routine, along with alternating Couch to 5k and a basic dumbbell routine (bicep curls, cross-body hammer curls, lateral raises, and rows). I have one rest day a week which moves around based on what I’m doing, but is usually Tuesday. Things that were very hard at the beginning are now much less hard, I’ve been able to follow Couch to 5k as written, and I’ve progressed to harder variations of the calisthenics exercises and to heavier weights for the strength workout.

A few weeks in I started stretching in the morning with the goal of being able to touch my toes, but I haven’t made any progress with that at all and the stretches don’t feel challenging, so I think I need to find a different routine. But the workout routine is working well.

#414

2026-09-06T00:00:00Z

Books

No books this week.

I did a bit of reorganisation and threw out some nonfiction I’m never going to read. I’ve also made a list of the Oxford Handbooks I’d like to read—I have the Cuneiform Culture one that I’ve been very slowly making my way through—as they’re really great, they’re quite accessible if you already have basic knowledge in the field and cover a lot. So I now have a big list, mostly in the categories of religion, mythology, and ancient history, that I intend to gradually work my way through.

Roleplaying Games

Played the other game this week, but the session ended in a TPK and the other player wasn’t really feeling it so we decided to drop it. We started this game because one of the Hot Springs Islands players is only available every other week, so now we need to decide what to do in this slot. I’ve got a few ideas I’ll think about a little and pitch to the group.

Miscellaneous

The hedgehog hasn’t visited for a couple of days, I hope it’s ok.

In other news, I got myself some new monitor arms. The ones I had been using were just cheap ones I bought several years ago, they were a bit short compared to the desk size (I use a dining table as a desk) so mobility was somewhat limited, and also one of them had started to creak and bounce when I adjusted it. So I picked up three Ergotron LX Pro arms. Much more expensive, but these things are great: the motion is completely smooth, they’re a good length, and they’re completely stable.

I’m also planning to upgrade my monitors (or perhaps just the main monitor), but that’s something for the future.

#413

2026-08-30T00:00:00Z

Books

This week I read:

Robot by Adam Wiśniewski-Snerg

This was a weird book. The protagonist is a humanoid robot, indistinguishable from a real human (and, as we later learn, a perfect physical copy of a real person) sent to infiltrate a huge underground shelter and carry out the orders of its creator, “the Mechanism”. Except, the Mechanism doesn’t seem to convey any orders at all. The first third of the story might be a dream or hallucination (I suspect there’s symbolism here that would be more clear if I were to go back and re-read it). Characters reoccur but have no memory of meeting the protagonist previously, or think he’s somebody else. The book is about alien abduction, but more than that it’s about the limits of perception and imagination, but even more than that it’s about free will and what that means.

Roleplaying Games

Hot Springs Island

A player who had been absent for the last few sessions returned this week, so we started with a long recap. Then straight back to exploration. The players ended up finding the Temple of Tranquility and accepting a bet to go down to the third basement level, but ran away when they attracted the attention of the giant albino centipede. They want to go back some time, but not to win a bet, for revenge.

Much discussion was had about getting a ship so they can travel between the islands without needing to rely on the Martel schedule, but no decisions were made yet. I’ll prepare things just in case.

Finally, they decided to go make friends with the ogres. We ended the session with them a couple of hexes away from Glavrok Village. Despite encountering a load of boars and other animals with parts the ogres value (and which the players know the ogres value), they haven’t killed anything to bring as a peace offering. So I’m interested to see what their approach will be.

Miscellaneous

Hister is pretty cool.

I started using it like bookmarks, manually adding stuff to the index that I thought I’d want to return to in the future, but that’s a lot of effort and I’ve come around to appreciate using the browser extension to just add every page I visit and using exclusion rules to filter out things I don’t want. I have 987 pages¹ indexed so far, with 55 rules (most of them excluding an entire domain, but it allows arbitrary regex). I’ve also chosen to exclude forum-like sites (reddit, hackernews, lobsters) from the index so in practice a lot of things I read are never going to get indexed, but I chose to do that because these sites have a lot of pages, and I barely ever want to return to, say, an old reddit thread.

I’ve got it set as my default search engine in Firefox, with fallback to Google if it can’t find something². It’s working well!

That includes all 412 (as of the time of writing this) weeknotes, so I’ve visited around 575 unique pages this week that were interesting enough to not immediately blacklist from the index.↩︎
I tried using Marginalia as my fallback search engine, but it’s sadly just not good enough. Almost everything I searched Marginalia for I had to go back to Google.↩︎

#412

2026-08-23T00:00:00Z

Books

This week I read:

The Return of the King by J. R. R. Tolkien

The thrilling final instalment! I always forget just how long the time spent hanging around in Gondor is after the defeat of Sauron, I know it’s quite a while, but it’s always more than that. But I think it’s necessary for the book, everyone deserves an epilogue. I have mixed feelings about the film omitting the Scouring of the Shire. It’s a very important part of the story thematically, I feel; that war isn’t only something that happens in far off lands, in foreign parts, places where people are different, that it can strike even the cosy familiarity of the British countryside. Sorry, I mean Hobbiton countryside, Tolkien was quite clear that there is absolutely nothing allegorical in The Lord of the Rings. I can see why it was left out of the film, it was that or cut something else, or make a fourth film, but is a shame.

The appendices are something else. I’m not sure I’ve ever read them fully before. I wasn’t expecting an explanation of how the names were translated.

Roleplaying Games

Hot Springs Island

W’re still playing alternate weeks, so no game this week. But I did spend a few hours preparing the wider Swordfish Islands setting.

I rolled up a village for Scenic Dunnsmouth and reskinned it as a research expedition: there’s two research groups who hate each other (and each considers their group in charge around here), a group of poorly-paid labourers, and the wealthy expedition funders. They’re here to study tropical swamp animals.

I also used Into the Wyrd and Wild to roll up a little pointcrawl for another of the islands, but I’m not completely sold on it. It needs some work.

Anyway, I’ve determined where all the nereids are trapped and have at least vague ideas of adventures for each of them, so I can just flesh these out a few at a time and deliver adventure hooks to the players as I have them.

Miscellaneous

Good news everyone, the hedgehog is back!

Or at least, something is eating the food. I think it’s most likely a hedgehog: I can’t think of many small (no larger than hedgehog-sized) nocturnal creatures that frequent British suburbs and willingly crawl into small ground-level holes. Birds don’t like enclosed spaces. Bats prefer to be high up. Squirrels aren’t nocturnal, and the squirrel that visits the garden prefers stealing nuts from the birds anyway. So even though I haven’t seen it, I think on the balance of probabilities it is likely a hedgehog.

In trying-out-new-software news, I’m still happy with donetick and vikunja as a Trello replacement, and I’ve made some more changes this week.

Firstly, I set up Authelia for SSO, now that I have donetick and vikunja and grafana which all have their own user management. I’m using the file backend for Authelia and have all the users (which is just me) defined in my NixOS secrets, giving me declarative user management.

Secondly, I’m trying out hister as a replacement for my basic home-made bookmarks search engine. I’ve not really had chance to play around with it yet, but it certainly looks nice. I’ve got it up and running with backups and SSO, and have gone through all my bookmarks and imported the small fraction of them that I was actually interested in keeping. I have a couple of blogs I want to look through too to make sure I have everything interesting stored (ACOUP and The Great Dungeon of the North).

Something I found a bit sad while looking through my existing 1000+ bookmarks is that a lot of the links are now dead. One thing that’s cool about Hister is that it stores a local copy of the page HTML and shows that in the search results, so even if a page is gone, I can still at least get the text content.

I’m toying with the idea of setting up a feed reader too, so I can migrate off The Old Reader, but I haven’t looked into options at all yet.

#411

2026-08-16T00:00:00Z

Books

No books this week! I thought I’d finish The Return of the King last night, but then it turned out those pesky appendices have a smaller font size…

Roleplaying Games

Hot Springs Island

This week I gave my players the run-down on the rest of the Swordfish Islands, as I had finally read Shipwrecked. They can go explore Marlo’s Mire and chat with the wizard if they want—I said there’s a weekly ship to / from Swordfish Port—though I have decided my version of Marlo’s Mire doesn’t have the airship, but that should be a fairly minor adjustment; and I’ve said that there will be adventures on the other islands, but likely not full hexcrawls.

I’m going to set Scenic Dunnsmouth on the creepy spiderweb island (I’ll replace the spider-people with the spider cultists from the adventure), and I’m going to scatter 10 of the nereid paintings around the rest.

Anyway, this week was spent mostly exploring the Lapis Observatory. The players found a magic sword, killed a giant snake, were imprinted upon by a tall naked golem, befriended a lizardman, and made off with thousands of gold worth of gaudy decorations. A pretty successful time really.

Miscellaneous

The hedgehog hasn’t come by all week. The food sits untouched in its little house.

In other news, I’ve switched away from Trello for my to-do list. Atlassian haven’t done anything terrible to it yet but I’m sure it’s just a matter of time before some AI nonsense gets forced in there. I’ve set up donetick for my chores, as it does a list of repeating tasks very well, and vikunja for the rest of the to-do list, as it has a kanban-style interface which is what I like.

I’m pretty happy with them so far, and going through everything in my Trello board as I manually copied data across prompted me to rethink or remove some things that had been there for a while. I need to get better at pruning old tasks, I think.

#410

2026-08-09T00:00:00Z

Books

This week I read:

HELLPIERCERS

A roleplaying game set after humanity has cast down the demiurge and reclaimed its inherent divinity, only to turn around and make war on Hell for the liberation of the dead. This game oozes flavour. It’s a tactical skirmish game which divides the game up into three modes of play: RECON, which is what I would consider normal RPG play; TACCOM, which is the tactical combat mode; and STRATCOM, which is kind of a planning and base-building mode in which both the players and the forces of Hell will modify the map and unlock units and powers for upcoming RECON and TACCOM phases.

Players are powerful. Most demonic minions go down easily, but there are a lot of them. Minibosses, boss monsters, video-gane-like puzzles, and interesting map design (the GM section on TACCOM explicitly calls out raids in MMOs as inspiration) is how you keep it from being just a boring slog of mowing down grunts.

It’s very different to anything I’ve played or run before, and I am looking forward to getting it to the table.

Roleplaying Games

We’re alternating Hot Springs Island and the megadungeon campaign by another player now, so it was megadungeon week again. It’s pretty interesting, we’ve found that the crypt-dungeon by home base has a connection to the world of the dead, which in turn has connections to various afterlives. This week we got to this central hub city which looks like a good place to adventure from going forward. We need treasure though, after three sessions all the PCs still only have a few hundred experience points, far from reaching level 2. And level 1 PCs are squishy.

Miscellaneous

I’ve seen a hedgehog out in the garden at night a couple of times recently, so I got a hedgehog house and some food from the RSPB. I put the house under some bushes and made a little path to it, as I’ve noticed the hedgehog likes the paths (makes sense, when you’re so small, the plants are very big):

I’m going to put food out in the evenings and see how it goes. I also have a ground-level bird bath I might move over to be next to the house so it doesn’t have to walk quite so far for water, as the birds prefer the elevated one and don’t use it much.

#409

2026-08-02T00:00:00Z

Books

This week I read:

The Two Towers by J. R. R. Tolkien

Many more differences to the films that I’d forgotten and, like Fellowship, some instances where pivotal moments are treated almost casually, resolved in very little text compared to everything around them. For instance, when Gandalf heals Theoden in the film we see that Saruman is magically controlling (or at least influencing) Theoden and there’s that cool line, “I draw you, Saruman, as poison is drawn from a wound.” In the book, we don’t see a direct involvement from Saruman, only the indirect involvement via Wormtongue, and the healing of Theoden is a much simpler and less magical matter.

The treatment of the Ents is, I think, better in the book. In the film the Ents decide not to go to war, but Merry and Pippin trick Treebeard into approaching Isengard and being so outraged by the devastation that he sees red and calls the Ents, who come marching out of the trees just a moment later as if they’d been waiting there all along. But in the book Treebeard wants war and the Ents decide in favour.

Two major differences, of course, are how Sam and Faramir are treated. There’s no trip to Osgiliath in the book, Faramir considers the matter and decides he wants no part in this Ring business, setting them free to go about their quest. And Gollum does not trick Frodo into banishing Sam, the two remain fast friends throughout.

Onto the Return of the King!

Roleplaying Games

Hot Springs Island

There’s a new Swordfish Islands book: Shipwrecked on the Swordfish Islands! I had a quick look through and it’s good, once I’ve read through it properly I’ll bring it into our campaign. I’m planning to put several of the missing nereids on other islands, and I’m also going to situate the Scenic Dunnsmouth somewhere with the Time Cube being a way to free Meltalia from the time-loop.

But enough about that, we also played today. Sadly we had to cut the session short, but in the time we played the players returned to the Lapis Observatory and started exploring it in earnest, as the translations of some brochures they’d taken last time were now done, promising sights such as the “Conservatory of Extraplanar Delights” and the “Observatory Museum”. There’s also a magic sword I put in that tower some sessions ago which I’m hoping they’ll find, as they don’t have any magic weapons yet.

They’re not sure yet what to do about Svarku, but the mood seems to be turning towards getting in contact with the Night Axe ogres, which will be fun. I hope they find Svarku’s missing gem, as that’ll really get things going.

It’s hard to predict how long this campaign will last as it could go on for quite some time, if the players are determined to explore things carefully and thoroughly, but there’s also several objects and individuals scattered around that, if disturbed, could radically alter the status quo. I expect the campaign to come to a sudden fiery end just when least expected.

Miscellaneous

I found myself in the unfortunate position this week of needing to buy a new USB C hub, as my current one sometimes disconnects randomly.

I’m not sure if it’s just me, but it seems weirdly difficult to get a good one. And by good I mean that it has several ports and also supports USB C Power Delivery (so you can also use it to charge a phone or something). Everything that supports Power Delivery has at most 4 ports (and usually fewer). Similar difficulties finding hubs that support USB C Video. I don’t need to transmit video over USB C, but it’s weird that there aren’t really any hubs that support that.

Is there something in the spec that makes a fully-featured USB C hub just difficult to produce?

I ended up buying a 7-port hub but it doesn’t support Video or Power Delivery. I can just keep plugging my phone into the wall I guess.

And if you try upgrading to the next generation, by getting a Thunderbolt hub, those seem limited by spec to only support 4 connections (one of which will be used to plug it into your PC). Again, it feels weird that these three things are simultaneously true: (1) almost every new device is USB C; (2) desktop motherboards commonly only have two or three USB C ports; (3) fully-featured USB C hubs have maybe four (if you’re lucky) additional ports.

Link Roundup

Roleplaying games

#408

2026-07-26T00:00:00Z

Work

I took this week off work.

Books

This week I read:

The Fellowship of the Ring by J. R. R. Tolkien

Hot on the heels of The Hobbit, I decided to re-read the rest of LotR, and wow there’s a lot which is slightly different to the film that I’d forgotten. The film is a very good adaptation, in my opinion, and does hit a lot of the major points of the book. And there are major differences everyone knows about, like shortening the time between the Birthday Party and Frodo leaving the Shire, or totally omitting Tom Bombadill and the Barrow-Downs, but there are also many other differences that I’d forgotten.

In some cases the order of events is slightly different, compressed or rearranged in the film for timing reasons, but sometimes it’s pretty big. Moria in particular is quite different: Gandalf was the one who proposed going through Moria (Caradhras was Aragorn’s idea), and Pippin throws a rock down the well quite early in their journey with the goblins only showing up days later. Aragorn gets Anduril when they set off from Rivendell, and there’s a lot less tension between him and Boromir. Gimli is much less comic relief, Legolas jokes more. Some major scenes are covered incredibly briefly too, the entire fight on Weathertop is only a couple of paragraphs; and yet we get pages upon pages of walking.

Roleplaying Games

I was visiting friends this weekend, and we played a bunch of different games: Astroprisma, Doom Pilgrim, Morkin, Old School Essentials, and Song of the Scryptwyrm. I don’t often get to play games in person, so it’s nice to do that from time to time.

Miscellaneous

I took the week off work, and spent it largely just lazing around, sleeping in, and playing games. I visited friends at the weekend, but got trapped and had to stay another day as there was a fire which shut down the train lines to Peterborough; a bit awkward as I didn’t really have any way of contacting work (I emailed my manager from my personal email, but I’d forgotten that he’s actually off this week so he wouldn’t have seen that anyway), but thankfully didn’t turn into a problem.

#407

2026-07-19T00:00:00Z

Work

I’ve taken next week off work, I plan to spend the whole time sleeping in and doing nothing of importance.

Books

No books this week.

Roleplaying Games

Hot Springs Island

This week’s session was taken up by the four-day New Moon Party at the island’s central volcano. This was a single extended social encounter, with some set-piece events, and we all had a good time. I came up with a little system for running competitions (see below), and the players got to interact with some NPCs and finally meet Svarku, the head of one of the major factions on the island.

Svarku’s a real charmer—genuinely interested in people, friendly, bestows gifts, hands out quests—and so it was a real downer for the players when Svarku declared that business was over, it was time to relax, and with a clap of his hands summoned forth 17 enslaved nereid strippers. Just as intended.

I came up with 8 competitions that would happen over the 4-day event (along with social encounters, exploration of the volcano, meeting Svarku, and so on). Each had an associated skill check, and if the players succeeded the check then they did fairly well in the contest; if they failed the check, nothing bad happened, they just did poorly. I’d hand out a random minor arcana tarot card for the player to use as inspiration to narrate how they did.

But if they passed the check they could choose to gamble: save vs doom to get a major arcana card, and either do incredibly well or make a complete fool of themselves. Win or lose, people would take note and talk. Furthermore, on a missed save vs doom, the character would lose half their HP (representing injuring themselves badly in the contest), and if they failed two contests they’d be left at 1 HP and too injured to enter any others.

It worked pretty well. The players generally did gamble on the save vs doom, and only one character got knocked out. The contests were:

Grand Melee: melee attack roll vs AC 12
Skeet Shooting: ranged attack roll vs AC 12
Javelin Toss: STR check
Lava Rock Skipping: DEX check
Obstacle Course: DEX or STR (whichever is worse) check
Race: CON check
Drinking: CON check
Boasting: CHA check

In addition to these contests there were also general carnival games, which resulted in one character winning a plush steam elemental core.

Miscellaneous

The garden has been suffering in the heat and drought these past few weeks, it’s gone a bit brown and crunchy. I’ve watered it a little, but not much as there’s a hosepipe ban. In principle it should spring back when the rain finally comes, but it’s a bit discouraging to see it fade away after it finally began to bloom.

Link Roundup

Roleplaying games

The first combat of Mork’s Warband!

#406

2026-07-12T00:00:00Z

Books

This week I read:

The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien

I’ve not read this in like 15 years! I thought it was time to revisit it, and I was struck by how tonally different it is to Lord of the Rings. Obviously it’s a children’s book, but I do have the revised version in which Tolkien made it a bit more consistent with the later books, and yet it really does feel like a very different world. We get the sense that while wizards are rare, they are around somewhat; as opposed to LotR where there’s a very small, fixed, number. Magic feels much more commonplace. Elves are, obviously, incredibly different, being much more the jolly fey type as opposed to the Serious Elder Peoples of LotR and the Silmarillion. Language just isn’t a concern at all, everyone—even monsters—speaks the common tongue (something I imagine irking Tolkien greatly even though he carried that forth into the later books). Giants live in the mountains. There’s a werebear that’s never explained. There’s a king of birds. There’s implied to still be a king of men.

It’s a much more whimsical world. There’s a great article in, I think, issue 1 of KNOCK! about the implied setting of The Hobbit, and I think I’ll have to revisit that too.

Roleplaying Games

No Hot Springs Island this week, one player was away and another had a megadungeon they wanted to playtest so I and the other remaining player did that. This might become a regular fixture, something that’s done when we’re not all here.

New Games

I’ve been trying out a lot of new systems this year, mostly solo but a few others. I thought it was about time I made a list:

Thousand Year Old Vampire: played it previously, and revisited it a couple of times this year. It’s ok, but definitely more of a creative writing exercise than a game.
Morkin: this is a really great solo game I discovered late last year which, for me, sits at the sweet spot between creative writing and boardgame. It doesn’t feel weird to roleplay (as it does with a boardgame), and yet it’s structured enough that you’re also not racking your brain for inspiration all the time.
Lichdom: another journalling game, in the same vein as Thousand Year Old Vampire but with enough mechanics to it that I think you can actually describe this one as a game and not just a tool to help you write.
Legend in the Mist: by the same authors as, and similar to, City of Mist, which was the first system I really played. I tried out a short solo game but found it pretty creatively taxing, I think it would go better with a group.
Ker Nethalas: a dungeoncrawling game, but definitely far over to the boardgame end of the spectrum. Roleplaying feels about as satisfying as it would in Monopoly, there’s no NPCs to interact with, it’s just purely about exploring a randomly generated endless dungeon until you die. Fun in short bursts.
ASTROPRISMA: only looked through the book and tried out some of the mechanics so far, but this looks a lot of fun and I’m looking forward to playing more of it.
Across a Thousand Dead Worlds: a sci-fi horror game by the same author as Ker Nethalas, but this introduces enough stuff that it’s definitely an RPG and not just a boardgame. It’s basically Gateway but as an RPG.
Ironsworn: played it in the past, had difficulty getting into it, played it again more recently and had a slightly easier time but still it doesn’t quite click. I think I’m learning that I prefer solo games that have a fairly well-defined core gameplay loop that can drive the action without needing me to constantly be creative.
Riftbreakers: another game by the Ker Nethalas author, this one intends to emulate the feel of an MMO, which is interesting for a solo game. There are online communities that play it individually but together, with events passing between different games, and people trading items and resources. I’ve only gone through the character creation (which is structured as a tutorial level), but am looking forward to more.
The Five Kingdoms of the Icemark: a sequel to Morkin, by the same author. The kickstarter completed only this week and we don’t have the rules yet, but I’m really excited for this one, as Morkin has been my favourite solo game so far.
HELLPIERCERS: not a solo game at all, and also not my usual sort of RPG, as it’s a tactics-heavy skirmish game. But it’s drawn me in with its gnostic theme (god is dead, we killed him, and now we’re invading hell to liberate the souls of the dead) and I want to see if this could work as a low-prep game when we can’t do the regular weekly campaign for whatever reason.