#347
May 25, 2025
Books
This week I read:
Exhalation by Ted Chiang
I said it last time and I’ll say it again: Ted Chiang is a master at taking a weird premise and running with it. Every story is essentially “what would it be like to live in a world where this is true? how would it change how people think and act?”
In this collection my favourite stories were: Exhalation, which is about entropy and the heat-death of the universe, but told through the medium of robots powered by air pressure (and the way he reveals they’re robots by rapidly building up all the weird inhuman aspects of their bodies and lives, without ever speaking about them as if they’re anything but living creatures, is brilliant); and Omphalos, which is about a world where young-earth creationism is literally true and has physical evidence (mummies with no navels, fossilised trees with no growth rings), but where it turns out that Earth is not the centre of the universe, that a newly discovered planet is, and so Earth is, what, a practice run? An accident? What does that mean for a deeply religious world?
Roleplaying Games
The Halls of Arden Vul
I thought this was going to be a diplomacy-heavy session, but the players decided to put that off for a week until some drugs they’ve bought for the beastmen arrive, to serve as a final negotiating chip. Instead, this session hit two of the pillars of dungeoncrawling: exploration and combat, both of which went pretty well.
We started with some rumour-gathering, where the players learned that the story of their fight with Jellik’s Jarls had mutated somewhat: word in the hall is that Jellik’s Jarls offended the Goblin King, or perhaps one of his advisors, and the party was sent to deal with the insult. It’s not entirely inaccurate, and they decided to let it stand for now. We also learned that the Sun-Scarred Knight who had been stationed with the Cult of Set left some weeks ago, which led to much pondering of the inscrutable motives of the Knights. Is it a good sign? Bad? Who knows.
After that they finished exploring the lair of a hag who they’d killed a few weeks ago, and finished reassembling the dismantled statue of a Thothian priestess: which turned out to the magic statue of a priestess who had voluntarily been transformed into this form to serve as a permanent conduit between Thoth and this world. She thanked them for reassembling her, quizzed them about recent developments in the Halls, and bid them good day.
Then we got onto the real dungeoncrawling. The players knew that there was some connection between the Halls of Thoth and the caves north of the Forum of Set, but nothing on their map looked like it would link up. They hypothesised there must be a secret door somewhere and set out to find it. They did, and while they didn’t find the link to the caves, they did wipe out a Setite guard patrol and have a few new promising avenues of exploration open to them now. That said, the battle was right next to the main temple of Set, so while reinforcements didn’t arrive in time for the poor guards, there definitely will be a much increased presence there for a while at least.
Miscellaneous
House Buying
We have exchanged, with completion set for the 29th!
This weekend I’ve packed away all the nonessentials (i.e. everything I’m not going to need in the next week and a half or so), and after the bank holiday on Tuesday I’ll ring a few removals companies to ask about moving some time late the following week. Unfortunately I’m on-call for work on the Friday (I was able to swap the whole rest of the week), so that likely means moving on either Thursday the 5th or Saturday the 7th.
I’ve also started sorting out utilities, council tax, preorders, and all the other things on my long list that need updating with the change of address. Unfortunately I won’t have internet in the new place until the 11th, but at least it’ll be symmetric gigabit when I do have it, at under half the price of my current (most definitely not symmetric gigabit) internet.
After the move I’ll need to come back to the current flat to give it a really thorough clean, take final gas & elextricity metre readings, and drop off the keys. I’ll probably do that on the Saturday or Sunday.