#335
Mar 2, 2025
Work
Long time since I’ve written anything about work.
We’ve had a month of, not exactly “downtime” since we launched the project I was leading (I don’t think there’s any public documentation yet so I’ll refrain from going into details, but suffice to say we’re selling it and the feedback so far is great), but a period of assorted non-project work.
Amongst other things, I’ve been making some improvements to our dashboard reporting feature: which is pretty basic right now, and the implementation makes it hard to address the two major pain-points, which are that (1) the numbers only update once a day, and (2) the way the timeseries data is stored makes it inherently non-localisable to anything but UTC. I’ve got an idea for how to solve both those problems by switching to an event-driven implementation which stores timeseries data at an hourly resolution, so it can be localised to different timezones when we’re aggregating things like daily or monthly totals.
Of course, the devil is in the details.
Books
This week I read:
The Terror by Dan Simmons
There’s a very good TV adaptation which I saw years ago, and which inspired me to pick up the book. I’ve tried reading this before, but couldn’t get into it; this time, however, I found it really gripping. I particularly appreciated the long bibliography at the end—as the story is a fictionalised version of real events—so if I feel like reading more about Arctic exploration (which seems pretty interesting), I have a good starting point.
Volume 11 of Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End by Kanehito Yamada and Tsukasa Abe
Which finishes the Golden City arc that I enjoyed, but not as much as earlier parts of the story. The volume ended on a time-travel cliffhanger, so I guess I’ll see what happens when volume 12 is released later this month.
Roleplaying Games
The Halls of Arden Vul
A very quiet session, especially compared to prior weeks. The players got up to some exploration and found some neat areas but also retreated from a lot of those areas due to monsters. We ended the session with a bunch of zombies animating in the room they just set foot into, but I expect they’ll just close the door and go somewhere else.
The players are fairly close to having a fortified base though, which means that the cleric player’s army of holy fanatics will start to arrive, and the players can finally set their major objective in motion: wiping out the Cult of Set. We’ll have to crack out some mass combat rules for that!
Miscellaneous
2025 is definitely the Year of Video Games, as this week I replayed The Talos Principle so that I had the story fresh in my mind to begin The Talos Principle 2, which I’d had on my wishlist for some time but only picked up a few days ago.
I was a little concerned playing a puzzle game and its sequel back-to-back might not be fun, but the puzzles in 2 are interestingly different, and so is the story. I love these mythological stories that hint at a deeper meaning to everything; sometimes I think I’d be happy as a forest-dwelling mystic.