#089

Work

On Wednesday I started in my new tech lead position. I spent that and much of Thursday and Friday having meetings, reading documentation, and thinking about what specifically we’ll be doing. It’s a new area for all the devs on the team, including me, so there’ll be a lot of learning for all of us.

Funnily enough, I feel that running RPG sessions for two years has helped prepare me for this, as it’s given me lots of practice of running meetings.

I’m looking forward to when we start to implement the prototype, as then I’ll be able to link out to repositories from this section and talk about the work more openly.

Books

On the one hand, my decision to read 100 pages a day is going poorly, because on a few days I didn’t felt like reading at all. On the other hand it’s going very well because I’ve read about 1400 pages this week.

This week I’ve read:

• The Hastur Cycle, edited by Robert M. Price. A collection of short stories featuring:

  • Haita the Shepherd and An Inhabitant of Carcosa, by Ambrose Bierce
  • The Repairer of Reputations and The Yellow Sign, by Robert W. Chambers
  • The River of Night’s Dreaming, by Karl Edward Wagner
  • More Light, by James Blish
  • The Novel of the Black Seal, by Arthur Machen
  • The Whisperer in Darkness, by H. P. Lovecraft
  • Documents in the Case of Elizabeth Akeley, by Richard A. Lupoff
  • The Mine on Yuggoth, by Ramsey Campbell
  • Planetfall on Yuggoth, by James Wade
  • The Return of Hastur, by August Derleth
  • The Feaster from Afar, by Joseph Payne Brennan
  • Tatters of the King, by Lin Carter

  It was pretty good, but there were a fair few typographical errors, including some that looked like encoding problems!

• The Hero of Ages, by Brandon Sanderson. The last book of the Mistborn series. I liked it, it tied everything up, and it turned out that “Worldbringer” was a more fitting title for the Keepers of Terris than I thought.

• Silverthorn, by Raymond E. Feist. The second book of the Riftwar series. I enjoyed it, but this series just seems to be eminently forgettable somehow. I had to read the summary of the previous book, because I could only remember the vague outline of what happened, despite only reading it late last year. I’ve apparently read this book before, long ago, but I couldn’t remember any of it.

Games

My Call of Cthulhu game is going well. Not having a pre-written module to follow makes prep pretty difficult, because Call of Cthulhu is an investigation game, so I need to make sure I’m giving clues and hints beyond just the immediate situation they’re in. Fortunately, my players don’t see that behind the scenes the story is held together with spit and glue.

It is getting easier though.

Miscellaneous

Today marks the end of my second year using Trello as a to-do list: in that time I’ve completed 803 tasks, including finishing my Ph.D thesis. It’s hard to imagine going back to my previous approach of just scribbling things down on bits of paper, having everything in one place is so much nicer.

Link Roundup

• A Novel Way to Think About Literary Categories
• Tea and capitalism
• Improving Random (libraries@haskell.org)
• Why is Idris 2 so much faster than Idris 1?
• Habits of High-Functioning Teams
• A year of working from home: Home Office’s post-coronavirus lockdown plan revealed
• #05 - NixOS Weekly
• Issue 213 :: Haskell Weekly
• This Week in Rust 340
• Whither the Dungeon? – The Decline and Fall of D&D Adventures
• Node-Based Scenario Design
• Random GM Tip – 5 Node Mystery