Books
This week I read:
Chronicles of the Black Company by Glen Cook
Which covers the first 3 books, and the first big arc of the story. I’d already read the first book, because I am silly and didn’t think to buy the collected book up front.
It was good, I liked it. I think the second book was better than the first, and the third was better still. The first book felt a bit weak in parts, because the story is very character-driven but didn’t (I think) really develop them enough. So spending more time with these characters really helped.
Furthermore, I think the writing style of very short chapters which jump between viewpoint characters they focus on works well for this sort of story.
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.