#386
Feb 22, 2026
Books
This week I read:
Volume 1 of The Book of the New Sun, by Gene Wolfe
Which I last read in 2020. It made a little more sense this time, I saw some things (like the towers of the Citadel being grounded rockets) much more easily, but there’s still so much that’s hard to figure out. Like what is Dr. Talos’ play about? There’s a couple of good podcasts (or so I’ve heard) about Gene Wolfe, I should really check them out some time as it’s enjoyable to try to figure out what he’s talking about just from the text, but I must be missing so much.
Roleplaying Games
The Halls of Arden Vul
This week the players said “we want to explore some heqeti areas” and then proceeded to get distracted at the first opportunity and go explore Kerbog Khan’s base and then deal with some feral varumani which had been killing and eating adventurers.
Things continue to tick along in the background: the Master of the Sun-Scarred Knights has read the players’ petition for aid in the war against the heqeti and in two more days one of the Knights will be sent to scout the heqeti “ruins” (now re-occupied) near the varumani domain. Discovering the ruins are reoccupied will put the varumani on high alert, and the PCs will be summoned to a conclave.
The module says that “under no circumstances” will the Knights invite adventurers (or anyone outside their Order) into their citadel. But it’s such a cool location and ruling it out—making it inaccessible to all but evil parties who decide to attack the Knights and seize their territory—is unsatisfying. As we’re coming towards the end of the campaign I want to show off some of these cool locations.
Miscellaneous
My heating stopped working this week and I had to get a plumber in to fix it.
It broke for the first time on Friday last week. I realised it was a bit chilly in the evening, went to put the heating on, but the boiler just displayed an error code. After a little research, I found that the manufacturer offered repairs: one fee to come, diagnose the problem, and fix it including any replacement parts. “This is clearly what I want,” I thought, but alas I was wrong. The plumber visited Saturday morning and quickly determined that the problem wasn’t with the boiler, so the £400 I paid didn’t actually cover anything in this case. He did discover that my water pressure was too low, which is why the heating had stopped working: low water pressure = too little water flowing through the boiler, so it can’t exhaust the heat quickly enough = shut down for safety reasons. He topped up the water in the heating system (for free) and that was that. He also said it sounded like my circulation pump (the thing that pushes hot water through the heating system) was on its way out and would need replacing at some point.
So I essentially paid £400 to have someone come turn on a tap.
On Monday, the heating stopped working for the second time. This time the pressure was still ok, and the boiler wasn’t showing any error code, or anything at all. I thought it was a bit of a coincidence to stop working so soon, so I contacted a different plumber. They charged £79 for diagnosis, which is under a quarter of what I paid the manufacturer’s guy. They came over Tuesday morning. I explained the previous visit, they had a look, and concluded that not only was the circulation pump now totally dead, but the reason the water pressure had been low is because there were a couple of dripping valves. I needed a new pump and new valves. This (including the £79 diagnosis fee) would come to about £1000. The earliest they could come to fix it would be Friday.
I passed a very cold week, and then on Friday they called to say they were really busy and couldn’t come until Monday. Thankfully they were actually able to come today, Sunday, though it’s been a pretty mild weekend so the lack of heating wasn’t so bad.
I’m a bit disappointed that I paid for a plumbing survey before I got the house and everything was rated as “good” or “excellent”: I feel that a pump completely failing in under a year, plus some valves that had evidently been dripping since before I bought the house as there was a crusty old towel beneath them which I hadn’t noticed when I viewed it, is neither of those things. Anyway, it’s all fixed now.