#214

Oct 23, 2022

Books

This week I read:

Roleplaying Games

This was supposed to be another week of three games, which is fun if a bit hectic, but then I had to cancel work D&D since all but one player dropped out. Unfortunately, this is the third time it’s happened—one of those times I was able to run a solo session for the player who could make it, rather than skip—so in (almost) three months we’ve had three proper sessions and one basically-a-oneshot. That’s a bit less frequent than the fortnightly schedule everyone was on board with up front.

Next session is supposed to be on the 2nd of November, but already 3 of the 6 players have said they can’t make it. If this keeps up, it might be best to drop the game; only recently I restructured the campaign to better deal with flaky attendance, but I fear even that won’t be enough. Playing, on average, 2.5 hours a month with a random subset of the players isn’t very conducive to people actually knowing what’s going on, and also it’s not great for anyone really if I keep scheduling games which then get cancelled shortly beforehand.

Miscellaneous

This weekend I’ve been playing around with Phoenix, the big Elixir web framework, something I last looked into in 2019 when I tried to rewrite bookdb. I didn’t get very far at the time, and in fact didn’t even remember I’d tried until I grepped through old weeknotes.

I’m trying to write a little CRUD thing to keep track of stuff I’ve watched or am watching, since I often forget, then start to watch something, and realise a little while in that I’ve seen it before. Not very complicated, and Phoenix can actually generate a bunch of boilerplate for me, but since it’s a new language and a new framework I’ve gone back to the beginning and started again a couple of times.

I don’t have much to show yet, right now I’m working on uploading poster images. Then I’ll concentrate on the UI for a bit, maybe see if I can use LiveView for some parts of it.