#413
Aug 30, 2026
Books
This week I read:
Robot by Adam Wiśniewski-Snerg
This was a weird book. The protagonist is a humanoid robot, indistinguishable from a real human (and, as we later learn, a perfect physical copy of a real person) sent to infiltrate a huge underground shelter and carry out the orders of its creator, “the Mechanism”. Except, the Mechanism doesn’t seem to convey any orders at all. The first third of the story might be a dream or hallucination (I suspect there’s symbolism here that would be more clear if I were to go back and re-read it). Characters reoccur but have no memory of meeting the protagonist previously, or think he’s somebody else. The book is about alien abduction, but more than that it’s about the limits of perception and imagination, but even more than that it’s about free will and what that means.
Roleplaying Games
Hot Springs Island
A player who had been absent for the last few sessions returned this week, so we started with a long recap. Then straight back to exploration. The players ended up finding the Temple of Tranquility and accepting a bet to go down to the third basement level, but ran away when they attracted the attention of the giant albino centipede. They want to go back some time, but not to win a bet, for revenge.
Much discussion was had about getting a ship so they can travel between the islands without needing to rely on the Martel schedule, but no decisions were made yet. I’ll prepare things just in case.
Finally, they decided to go make friends with the ogres. We ended the session with them a couple of hexes away from Glavrok Village. Despite encountering a load of boars and other animals with parts the ogres value (and which the players know the ogres value), they haven’t killed anything to bring as a peace offering. So I’m interested to see what their approach will be.
Miscellaneous
Hister is pretty cool.
I started using it like bookmarks, manually adding stuff to the index that I thought I’d want to return to in the future, but that’s a lot of effort and I’ve come around to appreciate using the browser extension to just add every page I visit and using exclusion rules to filter out things I don’t want. I have 987 pages1 indexed so far, with 55 rules (most of them excluding an entire domain, but it allows arbitrary regex). I’ve also chosen to exclude forum-like sites (reddit, hackernews, lobsters) from the index so in practice a lot of things I read are never going to get indexed, but I chose to do that because these sites have a lot of pages, and I barely ever want to return to, say, an old reddit thread.
I’ve got it set as my default search engine in Firefox, with fallback to Google if it can’t find something2. It’s working well!
That includes all 412 (as of the time of writing this) weeknotes, so I’ve visited around 575 unique pages this week that were interesting enough to not immediately blacklist from the index.↩︎
I tried using Marginalia as my fallback search engine, but it’s sadly just not good enough. Almost everything I searched Marginalia for I had to go back to Google.↩︎