Open Source
I made a new release of dejafu fixing an issue with the atomic restoration of masking state when an exception is thrown inside a restored mask.
This test case now always returns either Left ThreadKilled or Left UserInterrupt:
do var <- newEmptyMVar tId <- uninterruptibleMask $ \restore -> fork $ do result <- (Right <$> restore (throw UserInterrupt)) `E.catch` (pure . Left) putMVar var result killThread tId v <- takeMVar var pure (v :: Either AsyncException ())
Unlike before, when it would sometimes deadlock instead.
Work
This week we finished our discovery, so on the dev side of things we were finishing up all the in-progress work and reviewing our documentation. Next week we’ve got a lot of whole-team activities looking at the bigger picture of what we’re working on, before moving onto the next phase of prototyping.
The Plague
Things are starting to re-open, but I don’t expect it to have much of an impact on me.
Books
This week I read:
Tales of the Dying Earth by Jack Vance
There’s definitely some ideas I’ll be taking from this to make my fantasy worlds more fantastical. Even small things like saying “in all candour” instead of “verily”, “honestly”, or “truthfully” can make a place feel really different from the standard fantasy-medieval-Europe.
I also think Vancian magic seems like a really neat way of making magic feel mysterious, but they removed it from D&D 5e in favour of something more flexible! Pah!
Sly Flourish’s Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master by Michael E. Shea
Some good ideas in here, though bits of it are a bit D&D-centric. I like the idea of using Fate-style aspects when preparing interesting locations, to jog your memory and help you improvise; rather than my current approach which is to write a bunch of prose and re-read it mid-session.
Also the idea of preparing lists of random names ahead of time has somehow never occurred to me before. It may be because I’ve only run games online (with one exception), so whenever I needed a name I’ve then fired up the random name generator.
The Kobold Guide to Worldbuilding by Janna Silverstein et al.
Some really good advice in here, and I think I’m sold on getting the rest of the Kobold Guide books. It’s a collection of essays by fanatsy authors and game designers, drawing on their practical experience to advise new world-builders. There’s some good discussion of the assumed tropes of fantasy (eg, that the world is almost always post-apocalyptic); on how you can use things like geography and history to make a more believable world; on how to build societies, cultures, city-states, and more; and on religion, magic, and technology. I think the essays on mystery cults and secret societies, in particular, will pay dividends in my Call of Cthulhu games.
Miscellaneous
Turns out it’s pretty easy to make flapjacks. I should use this new knowledge carefully.