Finished Brian Aldiss’ Hothouse recently and I really enjoyed it. It’s that kind of high-concept, ecological, unique sci-fi that I love.
I’ve been wanting to garden more often but it’s a tough hobby in your 20’s. I’ll be moving out in a few months and allotments with their long waiting list and monthly fees don’t appeal to me. There’s a community garden down the road which I’ve been to a few times but it might become too much of a trek from my new place.
Currently researching organometallic structures and nitrogen fixing using palladium as a catalyst for my setting’s magic system. World building really opens up when you figure out a key way that your setting differs from reality.
I use hugo to build my blog from a bunch of Markdown files into a genuine static site.
Since it’s all local files I use Neovim and the command line to edit and update everything.
Creating a new post/ micropost
I use this quick and dirty script to generate a new micropost:
#!/bin/sh
dt=$(date '+%d%m%Y_%H%M%S')
year=$(date '+%Y')
cd ~/path/to/website
hugo new content/posts/$year/$dt.md
st -e nvim content/posts/$year/$dt.md
This makes a new micropost from my hugo template and opens a new terminal so that I can immediately edit it in Neovim. The script for regular posts is pretty much identical but it opens a different template so that I can fill in the title and chose whether or not to save it as a draft.
Here’s the script in action.
Eight books in a month, I haven’t seen those numbers since 2023! Even though I reduced my book goal compared to last year I might be on track to reaching it earlier than I expected.
Just started reading The Epic of Gilgamesh and the edition that I have, the Norton Critical Edition, is fantastic - loads of background detail and annotaions plus essays on the text. Real academic nerd shit. I’ll have to think about picking some more of these up if they’re all as good as this.
Cleaned up the site css a bit since having 3 or 4 different css files was bugging me. Due to the nature of stolencloned code I’m still working between two. Probably an easy merge but I’m a lazy bastard.
After mulling over my ideas for a new campaign setting with a friend I’ve come to some indefinite conclusions about how I want the game to play.
Firstly, the rules should either be B/X, a similar retroclone or a modified version of Into The Odd. Like ITO there’s a focus more on problem-solving and the use f items rather than magical hand-waving. I’m not sure if I’ll scrub rules for magic entirely since most of my players would be expecting something like 5e. If magic does exist then it comes with a great cost and a high risk, only the most nefarious and wicked would seek shortcuts to fate’s design. The characters too shouldn’t be too heroic, Elrics more than Conans, who rely on their forward planning to survive - it shouldn’t be uncommon for a player to have more than one character at a time.
Finally finished The Plantagenets. Great book but its no surprise that in a book about 250 years of history there’s times where it can drag. Still a very informative read that’s set me up nicely for some other books that I’ve been wanting to read but just didn’t have the background for yet.
