Week 11 of 2026: Bake Off

So, previous editions of this weekly thing – apart from the first one – did not include a “Watched” section. This is because I genuinely don’t really watch stuff, except for Youtube, which I am not going to track here. But this week, I’ve watched all of season 15 of the Great British Bake Off, as a preparation for my next Brindlewood Bay session. I did this while crocheting, truly cozy activities in the spirit of the game.

Watched

• Great British Bake Off, season 15

Read

• started Closer by Dennis Cooper – I read Sluts by the same author, and this looked thin and also gay, so a good way to get back into reading again. Turns out this one is from 1989 (as am I). Not sure so far.

Played

On Tuesday, I played the sixth episode in my ongoing Mausritter campaign. Interestingly I was a bit nervous about this one, because I had two new players and two returning players, but the returning players had not been in the same session. This lead to the interesting situation that one character was saved from a cult by the other character, yet the players had never met.

Because one of the new characters turned out to be a bee keeper, I nudged them to visited the location of Honey in the Rafters – an official published “adventure” of Mausritter. This was the first time that we actually ran into “official” stuff: most of the things up until now I had made up myself using the spark tables. I found that I was a bit lost in the story, for the module doesn’t really give that much either. I think I prefer a bunch of tables – lists of weird things with numbers so you can roll dice to see which one you have. That sparks the imagination and imagination fills in the blanks. If there’s too much pre-written, I tend to follow that too strictly and then we’re just left with not much ... because you just can’t write everything beforehand.

Other than that I didn’t play anything this week. I did attend the “session 0” of Dutchness & Dragons, an initiative in Amsterdam for people to learn Dutch through D&D, which I found very interesting as a neerlandicus. This was mostly introductions though: we didn't really play. Due to schedule mismatches I will not run a group there now, but maybe in the future.

Ran

I cut down the volleyball a bit, attending the Monday training, but skipping the Thursday training for a meetup about AT Protocol (the technology behind Bluesky) with Henrique. (That was cool but I was crippled with imposter syndrome and left earlier.) It was good to take it easier, but then again, I ran enough this week:

• Tuesday: 11.4km of Piramid Intervals: basically start with going pretty fast for a short distance (200 meters @ 3:30/km) and then walk and go fast again for a longer distance, and then after the slowest longest interval, do all of them again in reverse. It was a good training.
• Thursday: 9.6km easy.
• Saturday: 19.6km, containing 9km on my target half marathon place. Somehow, I broke my Dam tot Damloop (10 miles) PR by over six minutes, according to Strava. It’s was also a very beautiful route through the polders south of Amsterdam – with 19km you can really get great routes in, especially since I started from station Abcoude and ended at station Holendrecht, skipping a lot of the “filler” kilometers around my house that I already know so well.
• Sunday: why not add 11.9km with some tempo runs after that?