#316
Oct 20, 2024
Books
This week I read:
All of Death Note by Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata
The anime adaptation, at least what I can remember of it from all those years ago1, is really faithful to the manga. There are a few minor discrepancies but nothing worth writing about.
I was interested in how I’d perceive the second half of the manga, since the general opinion (which I share) is that the anime really goes downhill after Light kills L and Near and Mello take over. While I do still think the story would have been better if it ended with the death of L, and that Mello could have been cut entirely, I actually didn’t mind the second half so much in the manga. Plot-wise, it’s the same, but somehow it was more enjoyable in in manga form.
I still think Light was an idiot who could have easily won—e.g. when he made contact with Takada and Mikami he should have just killed the members of the Japanese task force and used Takada’s supporters to root out (or just protect him from) Near’s team; he didn’t actually need to try to outwit Near, he could have set himself up as an untouchable mob boss. And then, despite all the scheming, Near only won by chance, which was a bit unsatisfying.
Roleplaying Games
The Halls of Arden Vul
A lot happened behind the scenes this week, but the players barely noticed any of it.
The thegn sent two varumani hunters to capture some rare prey, to donate to the arena in exchange for an audience with the Lord of the Arena to ask him about Triv-Lok. Crellik-Var, of course, didn’t remember anything about her. After a few more days of consultation between the thegn and Ashoka, his court sorcerer, he called a Moot—a meeting of all the varumani—to discuss what is to be done. Points discussed included:
- That the rumours circulating about a new, non-crazy, rudishva being seen are in fact true
- That the thegn has met with this rudishva, who is named Triv-Lok
- That Triv-Lok has been asleep since before the collapse, and was recently found and awoken by some adventurers (the PCs)
- That she has no desire to rule the varumani, but instead seeks their aid
- That in return for helping her to return home, she will help them regain access to their ancestral halls
- That the help she needs is in the form of searching the halls for certain rudishva relics
The varumani are pumped. They are fully on board with this deal. They want Triv-Lok to come live with them (the PCs were out so they haven’t seen the messengers yet). Triv-Lok will slowly take control of them, due to them being genetically predisposed to rudishva influence, but she’s unlikely to abuse that position.
But what the thegn didn’t discuss at the meeting was that Triv-Lok also said she’d try her best to reverse the varumani’s degeneration. He wants to be sure she can do that first, but if it all works out he will go down as one of the greatest thegns: the one who found and negotiated with a rudishva to save the varumani in their time of need.
Akkadian
I think I’m coming around to preferring Huehnergard’s A Grammar of Akkadian. Worthington’s Complete Babylonian does have more fun exercises, but Huehnergard explains things better and in a more sensible order.
For instance, Akkadian has several different verb “systems” as well as multiple tenses: A Grammar of Akkadian teaches covers each tense in the “G system” first, as that’s the simplest and most common, whereas Complete Babylonian has a chapter on each tense which covers all the systems at once. It’s more to take in at once, and the explanation of each individual thing is briefer.
All that aside, I am now actually learning verbs! I’ve been able to translate half of the complaint letter to Ea-Nasir now, and I hope to finish it and put it on my website in the next couple of weeks.
I haven’t started cuneiform yet, but hopefully this translation practice will mean it’s not too tricky, as I have been translating from transliterated cuneiform, rather than normalised Akkadian. So when I do get to cuneiform, the new parts will be (1) how to work out which potential reading of a sign is the correct one, and (2) how to work out where the word breaks are. But the translation process after that will be the same.
Miscellaneous
This week I migrated from Promscale to VictoriaMetrics for my personal finance dashboard, as Promscale was discontinued early last year and this year had developed an annoying habit of losing data.
I’m pleased to say that VictoriaMetrics works well: it falls into the sweet spot of having a Prometheus-compatible query language and API, and also making it easy to import historic data. The API is pretty similar to Promscale, too, so I only needed minor changes to my data-loading script to switch over.
Link Roundup
Roleplaying games
Software engineering
TL note: “keikaku” means “plan”↩︎