#354
Jul 13, 2025
Books
This week I read:
Permutation City by Greg Egan
This was definitely one of those books where I felt the author should have just stopped writing earlier, rather than keep going and reduce a great novel to being merely good.
The first part of the book, which is really about 3/4ths of the page count, builds up two interesting questions—one philosophical (“what is reality?”) and one much more practical (“is this character insane?”)—and ends in a pretty dramatic way with said character killing himself for his beliefs. You see, if we take the philosophical question as true then it wasn’t really “death”, another version of him would carry on; but if we don’t subscribe to his philosophy, then he’s just a madman who wasted all his money and then killed himself.
It’s the perfect uncertainty to end the story on.
And then the second part comes along and immediately confirms that he was right all along and just resolves the philosophical question with little fanfare, but more importantly it focusses on a whole new conflict that wasn’t foreshadowed at all, that just comes out of nowhere. I think part 2 could have been great if it built this new conflict up more slowly, but as it is I feel I could have just torn those pages out of the book without reading them and the overall experience would have been better.
Roleplaying Games
The Halls of Arden Vul
The war against the Cult of Set is going very well: this week the party’s assassin, disguised as a Set Acolyte and armed with two potions of invisibility, a potion of gaseous form, a +2 dagger coated in poison, and a few beads of force, snuck into the Guild of Service and managed to assassinate two of the guild leaders (popping into visibility in front of witnesses both times) and executed a flawless getaway.
They also managed to free all the slaves the previous night and killed / charmed all the witnesses, so just as the Guild was trying to work out how like 50 slaves escaped with nobody noticing they were apparently attacked by an acolyte of the Cult, which I think has set some ideas going in the minds of the remaining leaders.
It looks like next week will be the decisive battle, and with the Guild at odds with the Cult, things could swing very heavily in the players’ favour.
Miscellaneous
Guild Wars
I finished the End of Dragons expansion for Guild Wars 2 this week. Overall, it took me around 4 evenings of play, which isn’t very long. The pace of the story felt a bit off too, e.g. there was a subplot introduced about these two warring gangs which had to be won over, but they were introduced and the problem resolved in a couple of short missions, I didn’t feel I really knew these guys at all (or why getting their support was important). There was another part where I had to wait for 10 sets of research notes, but there was no delay between receiving them: I could just go through all 10 back to back.
Makes me wonder if, at the time it was released, the content was made available only gradually. Then you’d have had to actually wait for the research notes, and the warring gangs would have been significant as you’d have spent time, outside of the story missions, in the regions they fought over.
I then returned to Path of Fire, the previous expansion, which I never finished. So far I’m enjoying the story more than End of Dragons.
Decorating
The office and living room have been painted! The effect is just what I hoped for, the almost-black of the walls fits in very nicely with the almost-white of the carpet and the warmer tones of the wooden furniture. But it’s not done yet: I still need to put things in order, unpack all the books, and figure out exactly what art prints to put up.
The painter’s coming back on Monday to start on the bedrooms, so those will probably be done on Wednesday. I’m looking forward to it!
Anime
It’s another new season, and I’ve picked up season 2 of Call of the Night, season 2 of Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt (incredible that this got a sequel), and Silent Witch. All strong starts.