#078
Mar 15, 2020
Work
I went on support on Wednesday, and heard that there was going to be some re-jigging of teams next week, so I spent Monday and Tuesday trying to finish off any stuff I had in progress in case I moved teams.
I’m actually staying on the search team, but almost everyone else is moving off it, as new teams are spun up to handle coronavirus-related work. Just as the Brexit stuff was calming down a bit, we get a pandemic…
It’s been fairly quiet on support so far, though we’ve started smashing our email records. So many people have been signing up for travel advice and coronavirus updates, and there have been so many updates to that content, that we sent 3.6 million emails on Thursday. When I left the office on Friday we were on track to beat the pre-Thursday record again. It’s nice to see that we’re capable of handling such an increase in load.
Miscellaneous
Books
I read volumes 7, 8, 9, and 10 of Overlord. Volume 9 is the last one covered in the anime, so I’m now in new territory. I’ve ordered volume 11, which is the latest one translated into English (volume 12 comes out in English in June).
I can see why light novels have such a large audience, they’re really quick to read (getting through one volume takes only a few hours), and you don’t need to think so much. Though that has its downsides too. I’d really like to see some Silmarilion-style exploration of the history of the world in the Overlord setting, though that’s never going to happen. It’s all about the main characters, the world is just the stage on which they perform.
Games
The first proper session of my Apocalypse World game happened yesterday. I got a bit stuck a few times with the amount of improvisation needed, especially when a string of bad rolls exhausted the list of ideas I’d scribbled down before the session. But on the whole I think it went well.
I’m not really sure yet how I feel about the system. My gut feeling is that I don’t like the core mechanic that much (all challenges are roll 2d6+stat; 10+ is a success, 7-9 is a partial success, 6- is a failure with a complication), as one thing I liked a lot in Call of Cthulhu was the ability to decide the difficulty of a task. In Apocalypse World it’s “impossible and doesn’t need a roll to decide that”, “possible and doesn’t need a roll to decide that”, or “possible, but needs the standard roll to see how it goes”, which is much coarser grained. I’m trying to give it a fair chance before deciding, though.
Miscellaneous
I watched The Witcher this week. It was good, I’m looking forward to the next season.