#384
Feb 8, 2026
Books
No books this week.
I started reading The Female Man by Joanna Russ but didn’t really get it; the first SF Masterwork that just didn’t land at all for me.
Roleplaying Games
The Halls of Arden Vul
What a momentous session! The party entered the 12th Trial and there met Arden herself, now ascended to demigodhood, who congratulated them on their worth and tasked them with driving out the heqeti and cleansing their ziggurat at the base of the dungeon. The whole first hour of the session was just roleplay, and it was incredibly satisfying to get to this moment I’ve been anticipating for so long.
The description of the demiplane and how Arden would act are fairly brief (by Arden Vul standards), so I embellished a lot. But all in all it was a very easy session to prepare, as I’ve been imagining and thinking about this encounter for months now. I want it to stand out in memory once the campaign ends as one of the great moments, and I like to think I did a good enough job for that.
The rest of the session was spent planning the upcoming war against the heqeti and making initial preparations: contacting potential allies, scouting, and preparing a forward operating base. The players are pursuing this new objective with all their strength, so the campaign probably doesn’t have long left. What better way to wrap up an epic three year campaign than a climactic battle atop a demon pyramid 1800ft below the surface?
Miscellaneous
All the garden stuff arrived this week, so on Saturday I went out and finished everything I can before spring. I set up the bird zone—feeder, table, and two baths—I’ve not seen a bird use the feeder or baths yet, but I have seen one checking out the seeds I left on the table. I cleared out all the woodchips from the sunflower area (I left the chips there to avoid unintentionally sowing yellow rattle). I put together the composter. And I laid out some woodchip paths.
Now all that’s left is to do something with the giant pile of unneeded woodchips (it’s way too big to fit in the composter), and then in March sow all the wildflower seeds.
In less good news, I got a letter from the Student Loans Company. Due to an error with my salary deductions in 2022, I never actually paid off my student loan when I thought I did: I owed a small balance of £408, which has since increased by £70 due to interest.
Honestly it’s pretty annoying that they left it three and a half years to tell me, and didn’t send me any annual statements or any other form of communication at all in that time. I feel they could have reached out in late 2022 (“hey, we notice you haven’t been paying, but you still owe us this money”) or 2023 (the next financial year) at the latest, and then most of this interest could have been avoided. So I’ll need to ring them up next week and pay off the remaining balance before they send debt collectors after me or something.
And it is, unfortunately, definitely real and not some sort of scam. I can see the balance owed in my online student loan account. I suppose you could argue that I should have been keeping an eye on that balance, but after ringing up the SLC specifically to pay off my loan in full, and to have the person on the other end of the line charge me nearly £7000 and tell me that my loan was now paid off in full, why would I manually check? The SLC should have told me that the amount of money they received from my salary deductions was £408 less than they expected when it happened.