#293
May 12, 2024
Books
This week I read:
Weird Tales: 100 Years of Weird edited by Jonathan Maberry
So many good stories in here. I only know of Weird Tales by reputation, I’ve never actually read an issue, and to be honest I didn’t know it was still going. So when I saw this book I had to pick it up and while I feared that it would just have the classics that have already been anthologised to death, I was pleasantly surprised to find it’s mostly new-to-me and relatively recent stories, with a smattering of the classics.
I don’t think I could pick a single favourite, but suffice to say I’ll be looking further into some of these authors.
Roleplaying Games
The Halls of Arden Vul
After the disaster that was last week—in which half the party were slaughtered by endgame-level foes—we had a rather calmer session this week.
We began by recruiting a bunch of replacement retainers, sadly they didn’t manage to get the one with the best name (a goblin named “Cakewatcher”), but they did at least fill all the niches they were looking for: two frontline fighters, a spellcaster, a thief, and two porters. Then they set off back to the dungeon to go visit the fabled Forum of Set, by all accounts a wretched hive of scum, villainy, and commerce.
For some reason, the players very rarely carry cash on them, so when they got to the forum and were asked to pay the (very modest) entrance fee… they had to send half their people back. They also couldn’t actually buy anything while they were there. Oh well. At least a player did say “we really ought to start carrying more money”, so maybe—maybe—they’ll stop falling afoul of this problem everywhere they go.
Next time they want to try to join up two sections of their map which they know to be on the same dungeon level. “Just” joining up the map… I see after a year of Arden Vul, just how big the dungeon is hasn’t really sunk in.
Miscellaneous
I’ve been up to a few things this week:
I started to upgrade some of my kitchen equipment: the generic (also inconsistent and not-in-the-best-condition) cutlery replaced with a nice wooden-handled set; a new set of matching glasses; some of the excess mugs and teacups thrown out. Next I want to replace my kitchen knives, which I’ve had for 12 years and not sharpened once.
The temperature is going up, so I’ve dragged the AC unit out of storage and set that up in my living room. It’s more useful here than in the bedroom, and if a night is just too hot to sleep I can use the sofa-bed.
I finally bit the bullet and just deleted my NixOS desktop configuration: Windows 11 is my daily driver now, and I always have an SSH connection open to a Linux machine anyway; I don’t really need a graphical Linux machine.
I spent some time looking into Proxmox, toying with the idea of combining my desktop and server machines, and running both virtualised on top of Proxmox for better resource usage. But for various reasons I’ve soured on the idea, and I’ll just keep the two separate computers. I think my next big home computing change will be what I’ve long wanted: putting everything in a rack. But finding the floorspace, without trailing cables all through my flat, is proving difficult…
I’ve revised my budget quite a bit, taking into account the raise I got for being promoted. A bit more discretionary spending, and a lot more saving. In particular, I now have a holiday budget, so my next trip to Japan (or wherever) doesn’t require me to divert all my excess income for 6 months.
I chased the landlord on my tenancy renewal, and finally got that all sorted. So I now have this flat for another year. The rent’s gone up, but not by as much as it would have if I’d had to get a new place.
I watched The Lair (2022), a fun film but nothing special.