#412
Aug 23, 2026
Books
This week I read:
The Return of the King by J. R. R. Tolkien
The thrilling final instalment! I always forget just how long the time spent hanging around in Gondor is after the defeat of Sauron, I know it’s quite a while, but it’s always more than that. But I think it’s necessary for the book, everyone deserves an epilogue. I have mixed feelings about the film omitting the Scouring of the Shire. It’s a very important part of the story thematically, I feel; that war isn’t only something that happens in far off lands, in foreign parts, places where people are different, that it can strike even the cosy familiarity of the British countryside. Sorry, I mean Hobbiton countryside, Tolkien was quite clear that there is absolutely nothing allegorical in The Lord of the Rings. I can see why it was left out of the film, it was that or cut something else, or make a fourth film, but is a shame.
The appendices are something else. I’m not sure I’ve ever read them fully before. I wasn’t expecting an explanation of how the names were translated.
Roleplaying Games
Hot Springs Island
W’re still playing alternate weeks, so no game this week. But I did spend a few hours preparing the wider Swordfish Islands setting.
I rolled up a village for Scenic Dunnsmouth and reskinned it as a research expedition: there’s two research groups who hate each other (and each considers their group in charge around here), a group of poorly-paid labourers, and the wealthy expedition funders. They’re here to study tropical swamp animals.
I also used Into the Wyrd and Wild to roll up a little pointcrawl for another of the islands, but I’m not completely sold on it. It needs some work.
Anyway, I’ve determined where all the nereids are trapped and have at least vague ideas of adventures for each of them, so I can just flesh these out a few at a time and deliver adventure hooks to the players as I have them.
Miscellaneous
Good news everyone, the hedgehog is back!
Or at least, something is eating the food. I think it’s most likely a hedgehog: I can’t think of many small (no larger than hedgehog-sized) nocturnal creatures that frequent British suburbs and willingly crawl into small ground-level holes. Birds don’t like enclosed spaces. Bats prefer to be high up. Squirrels aren’t nocturnal, and the squirrel that visits the garden prefers stealing nuts from the birds anyway. So even though I haven’t seen it, I think on the balance of probabilities it is likely a hedgehog.
In trying-out-new-software news, I’m still happy with donetick and vikunja as a Trello replacement, and I’ve made some more changes this week.
Firstly, I set up Authelia for SSO, now that I have donetick and vikunja and grafana which all have their own user management. I’m using the file backend for Authelia and have all the users (which is just me) defined in my NixOS secrets, giving me declarative user management.
Secondly, I’m trying out hister as a replacement for my basic home-made bookmarks search engine. I’ve not really had chance to play around with it yet, but it certainly looks nice. I’ve got it up and running with backups and SSO, and have gone through all my bookmarks and imported the small fraction of them that I was actually interested in keeping. I have a couple of blogs I want to look through too to make sure I have everything interesting stored (ACOUP and The Great Dungeon of the North).
Something I found a bit sad while looking through my existing 1000+ bookmarks is that a lot of the links are now dead. One thing that’s cool about Hister is that it stores a local copy of the page HTML and shows that in the search results, so even if a page is gone, I can still at least get the text content.
I’m toying with the idea of setting up a feed reader too, so I can migrate off The Old Reader, but I haven’t looked into options at all yet.