#352
Jun 29, 2025
I’m feeling a bit under the weather today, so a very abbreviated weeknote.
Books
This week I read:
The Ritual by Adam Nevill
Last read in 2020! I’ve also picked up a few more Adam Nevill books to read over the coming weeks.
Roleplaying Games
The Halls of Arden Vul
This week was mostly preparation for beginning the big war against the Cult of Set, which we’re aiming to begin in session 100: next week. The major happening is the negotiation with the Sun-Scarred Knights. Unfortunately, we had to cut the session a bit short as I started to have internet issues (more on that below), so we’ll probably finish off negotiations via chat before next time.
Miscellaneous
I’ve been having periodic bouts of slow internet since it was set up, that appeared to be Google specific:
- The youtube web interface is laggy, taking a noticeably long time to load and sometimes times out
- When I download a youtube video, the download speed hovers around 50KiB/s
- My Pixel phone took about 8 hours to download a 3.12GB update
- Pulling docker images from mirror.gcr.io (the Google Container Registry) frequently times out
- Articles on Blogspot (owned & operated by Google) load slowly, and images frequently fail to load
- This week: Discord voice chat, which goes through Google Cloud, became unusably garbled
The internet connection in general appears to be fine otherwise, and speedtest.net shows consistently good speeds even while I’m simultaneously having issues with Google.
Firing up mtr revealed some bad news:
nyarlathotep (10.0.0.3) -> youtube.com (142.250.180.14) 2025-06-28T03:05:14+0100
Packets Pings
Host Loss% Snt Last Avg Best Wrst StDev
1. 10.0.0.1 0.2% 2500 0.1 0.1 0.1 1.7 0.1
2. 31.41.250.97 7.4% 2500 3.9 44.2 3.0 3108. 282.9
31.41.250.109
3. 195.72.67.241 7.4% 2500 4.3 53.2 2.8 3040. 312.7
31.41.250.109
4. 213.200.113.34 8.1% 2500 3.7 53.9 2.8 3123. 330.6
31.41.250.109
5. 87.119.95.130 7.4% 2500 4.1 54.8 2.8 3100. 330.7
31.41.250.109
6. 192.178.97.49 7.3% 2500 5.2 58.5 4.2 3111. 339.3
31.41.250.109
7. 142.251.54.31 7.4% 2500 4.4 55.0 3.6 3084. 325.9
31.41.250.109
8. 142.250.180.14 7.1% 2500 4.5 55.5 3.5 3072. 325.9Oof. 7% packet loss with ping occasionally spiking to 3s. Here’s a trace to barrucadu.co.uk:
nyarlathotep (10.0.0.3) -> barrucadu.co.uk (116.203.34.201) 2025-06-29T20:34:10+0100
Packets Pings
Host Loss% Snt Last Avg Best Wrst StDev
1. 10.0.0.1 0.0% 2500 0.2 0.1 0.1 39.6 0.8
2. 31.41.250.97 0.0% 2500 4.2 3.9 3.1 6.8 0.4
3. 31.41.250.6 0.0% 2500 4.5 3.9 3.2 6.9 0.5
4. 195.66.227.209 0.0% 2500 15.5 15.0 14.4 16.4 0.4
5. 213.239.252.169 4.2% 2500 20.0 19.7 19.1 21.0 0.3
6. 213.239.237.237 0.0% 2500 20.0 19.8 19.2 32.1 0.4
7. 213.239.203.102 0.0% 2500 20.2 30.8 19.1 764.5 57.2
8. 213.133.112.106 0.2% 2500 20.9 24.2 19.7 116.0 11.3
9. (waiting for reply)
10. 49.12.140.149 0.0% 2500 19.9 19.7 19.0 21.0 0.4
11. 116.203.34.201 0.0% 2500 20.1 19.9 19.3 21.4 0.4Much better.
10.0.0.1 is my router, so it certainly appears to be something in the ISP’s network. Notably, 31.41.250.109 doesn’t appear in the good trace, whereas in the youtube trace some packets went via 31.41.250.97 and some via 31.41.250.109. So maybe 31.41.250.109 is the issue.
For some reason my ISP only lets you submit support tickets during working hours, so I’ll be doing that first thing tomorrow.