Books
This week I read:
Volume 4 of Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End by Kanehito Yamada and Tsukasa Abe
Still very good, but actually catching up to the anime a lot more quickly than I expected. I think I’ll hold off until the anime finishes, so I’m not reading about something the same day I watch an episode about it.
Roleplaying Games
The Halls of Arden Vul
Finally back to Arden Vul. The players almost turned and left the Hall of Shrines, with just the treasure they’d found so far, without discovering the ancient alien room. But thankfully one of the players decided to poke around the room a bit before leaving, and they found it.
Sudden genre-shift into sci-fi, here we go!
Unfortunately the players didn’t have a Compehend Languages spell or anything similar ready to go, so all they could do was look at the cryopods, but they did realise that the silhouettes they could barely make out beyond the frosted glass looked an awful lot like the Lord of the Arena… Excellent recall, that, we’ve not seen the Arena in several months of play.
After an unfortunate run-in with an alien death-bot—which killed one of the retainers in a single hit—and subsequent flight back to town, the players decided to go question the Lord of the Arena, now that they think he might be an ancient alien. But I suspect the Lord is pretty busy, and they’ll have to prove their value before getting an audience.
Maybe capturing a dangerous monster, hmm.
Miscellaneous
I’ve been making good progress with my little distributed container orchestrator, called thing-doer (because I am good at naming things). Right now I have three little Rust services which coordinate their actions through etcd:
schedulerd, which watches for new unscheduled pods and allocates them to workers.workerd, which watches for new pods assigned to it and runs them.reaperd, which watches for disconnected workers and marks all their non-terminated pods as dead.
And it does indeed run things now! Not containers yet, my pods just define a command to run and a set of environment variables to give it, but it’s enough to prove the concept.
I think the next step is to run actual containers. Then once it’s running actual containers I can start to add things like pod networking via flannel, resource limits (and scheduling based on them), and healthchecks.
I also need to build an apid to allow creating pods (and other resources), as well as watching state changes, without needing to talk directly to etcd. Pods which watch resource state changes and change or create other resources in turn is going to be the fundamental building block for all the higher-level concepts, such as replica sets.