Books
This week I read:
Mystery Cults in the Ancient World by Hugh Bowden
Which was a good overview of the more prominent mystery cults and also mystery cults in general and their place in society. It starts out by contrasting the modern “doctrinal” style of religion and contrasting it with the “imagistic” style which is based upon infrequent, emotionally intense, rituals. I found it interesting just how central the unknowability of the gods was to Greek and Roman religion: people did certain rituals and used certain names, but that’s just because it’s what seemed to work. Quite a few mystery cults venerated gods whose names weren’t even known, or who were identified inconsistently.
I also found it really interesting just how many people were initiated in the mysteries. It sounded like almost anyone could join, so long as you could make it to the relevant location, and yet these huge numbers of initiates kept the secrecy so well that we now know very little about what they actually thought or did.
Roleplaying Games
ALIEN
This week we finished off Act 1 and did Act 2 of the Destroyer of Worlds scenario. It went pretty well, I kept the pace up to keep it fun and to keep the players feeling slightly off balance, like they were losing control of the situation (which they were). I skipped over most of the Act 2 content, since I think it’s the weakest part of the scenario, and we ended with the PCs approaching Fort Nebraska (along with a few marine NPCs they adopted along the way) desperate to find some way to access the space elevator and get the hell off this colony.
Two PCs have died so far, and two more are infected. They’ll pop at appropriately dramatic moments next session. It’ll be fun!
bookdb (& bookmarks)
I’ve finished my rewrite of bookdb in Rust and, for good measure, I rewrote bookmarks in Rust over Friday too. bookmarks was actually the simpler of the two, surprisingly.
Here are some thoughts:
I have quite a lot of code converting from sensible data structures to things that work well with tera, the templating library I picked. I should look for a different templating library that lets me use normal Rust data structures and call normal Rust functions.
Being able to embed static files (stylesheets, templates, images, etc) at compile-time, giving a self-contained executable, is very nice.
Being able to automatically deserialise form data and suchlike is not actually very useful, since you almost always want to customise the error response page when the submitted data is invalid.
Moreover, serde_urlencoded has chosen to not support specifying multiple values for a field. Which makes the built in querystring and form deserialisation basically useless.
Dealing with multipart forms feels unnecessarily painful.
Being able to automate most (or even all) of the (de)serialisation between domain objects and Elasticsearch is great.
On the whole, I think the non-web parts (interacting with Elasticsearch, modelling domain objects) is better in Rust. But the web parts were better in Python. Though, all the frustrations with the web parts are based on one web framework (actix-web) and one templating library (tera), I didn’t really look for alternatives that I might like better.