#324

The Halls of Arden Vul

The party took out the ice elemental and its ghoul minions easily enough, and then commenced to thoroughly loot the place. Amongst all the treasure they found a few notes providing clues to an old mystery they never fully resolved… will they revisit it?

I hope so, but say one thing about Arden Vul: there’s always something else to do.

In my session prep, when I was reviewing all the varumani’s data crystals, I decided that the thegn would reward the players richly for what they’ve done. They brought him a non-crazy rudishva who claims to be able to reverse the varumani degeneration, they brought him a means of viewing their ancient records, they brought him a tape of the legendary First Thegn, and furthermore their now-viewable ancient records back up what this rudishva is saying.

So he called them into a private meeting and named them “Friends of the Varumani”. No longer merely “Triv-Lok’s retainers” they had earned his respect all by themselves. He asked them to name any reward that was in his power to grant, and they asked for… free use of the lifts. Which is something I considered, and explicitly rejected, in my prep. It’s barely a pittance, it saves several gold every few days and they’re incredibly rich.

But I guess the players just don’t want to have to carry loose change…

Geodistributing my website (+ website changes)

I did a cool little project this week: I set up a mirror of barrucadu.co.uk in America, and configured GeoDNS to route American visitors to that instance (and the rest of the world to the Europe server).

I wrote a blog post about it: Geodistributing my Website (with GeoDNS and NixOS)

But wait, I don’t have a blog! As a secondary project I added blog posts, an atom feed, and markdown support to my website, as well as a bunch of template changes (mostly around making it a bit more colourful). I’m planning to write a post about the Advent of Ištar when that’s done, but I probably won’t write more than one or two posts a year, based on past experience.

Finger

I was quite anxious last week about the potential state of my finger, but it’s healing well. When I took the bandage off it was covered in a huge scab, but that’s mostly flaked off over the week, with just a small bit left at one end of the cut. I realised, too, that the pain I felt from flexing the finger was actually due to the scab digging into the flesh, and that’s gone now.

So there’s still a bit to heal before the cut is fully closed, but it’s nearly there now.

I’ve definitely lost some sensitivity on the side of the finger above the cut, though that may be temporary: at the beginning of the week it was almost totally numb, but now I feel a weird tingling when I touch it. I guess time will tell whether that’s permanent.

Teeth

This week I was due to have a root canal and a wisdom tooth extraction, both of which went way better than expected.

The root canal got aborted, as when the dentist got in there he found the decay was less severe than expected, so he just did a regular filling instead.

The wisdom tooth extraction was apparently a fairly complicated one, and the dentist kept having to inject me with more anaesthetic as I kept feeling it, but in the end I didn’t feel a thing when the tooth came out and, while it was fairly sore for the rest of the day and I’m still eating soft foods, there hasn’t been much in the way of after-effects. No swelling, no pain, just a bit of soreness. The strangest part is that I can feel the gap. You don’t really feel your teeth, but you can really feel when one is freshly gone.

Next week I have no dental work (to give the extraction site time to heal), then I’m getting one final (I think) filling on the 23rd.

Look after your teeth!

Software engineering

• Homelab: Setting up Caddy Reverse Proxy with SSL on NixOS
• Building a Tiny CDN With pyinfra and Chimera Linux