Souls Like Strings

Games

Not too many reviews since this was very much the month of Clair Obscur, which I've technically finished but not 100%-ed as I write this. Will hold off until then to write the review because man it certainly has a postgame.

Black Mesa gave me some insight into why Valve was such a big deal as a developer before Steam became a money printer, delivered noticeably more graphically palatably than the original.

Of the Devil's first episode was much slower paced than the demo but paid it off with a deeper storyline & mystery, while Gorogoa...

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Why

• Well written mystery
• Worldbuilding continues to be an entertaining look at cyberpunk dystopia
• Serra

Why Not

• Reading to gameplay ratio skews heavily to reading
• Leading to much lower energy than the demo

Impressions

After the initial shock at the degree to which dialogue/gameplay balance collapsed in the direction of dialogue compared to the demo, I had quite a good time with this episode. It makes sense there's a lot...

• I'm sure it feels great to see all the 'vulnerabilities' an LLM found in your codebase, but it does not feel equally great to be the dev who then has to spend hours verifying that they may be 'vulnerabilities' but the worst attack possible is... force logging out a user
  • Also they're there because of intentional design decisions to enable some feature
  • I think if you're gonna LLM-generate a bunch of stuff you need to at least put in some effort to verify it's not all nonsense before dumping hours of work on other people
• 6/7...

A City on Mars by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith.

The Expanse without the optimism

This book feels like it should open with NO in large, bold type, centered on the page. Despite being space nerds the Weinersmiths convinced themselves over the course of their research that any substantial off-world settlement in the next century or so is not only unlikely but probably undesirable. Having finished hearing about their reasoning I'd have to agree, as if Elon Musk providing the only shot at achieving such a settlement wasn't reason enough to avoid it like the plague.

• The JS sass package either doesn't follow semver at all or doesn't consider going from hex to RGB colors a breaking change
  • Which I guess is technically true in CSS, the color got more accurate if anything because RGB can use floats
  • But 'more accurate' could be breaking in the sense it changes
  • e.g. I imagine every Playwright e2e with a snapshot on the team I used to be on loan to would fail
• Be careful when replacing the location from useLocation
  • If you just remove it & rely on Typescript to tell you where...