Souls Like Strings

The Night the Lights Went Out by Drew Magary.

Man hits head, wakes up and wants fried chicken

I like the way this guy writes; even though it's kinda performative it's performative in a genuine way, probably something like how I'd write about a traumatic event in my life. There's not really one thing which makes this book interesting; you can read about the effects of a brain injuries, loving families and certainly straight white guys being idiots/in love with meat in other places, but this one pulls those elements together in a compelling way that made...

High concept scribbles

Why

• Genuinely unique art style that somehow works
• Combat is pretty engaging/complex
• If you enjoy having absolutely no idea what's going on

Why Not

• You don't like the art-style
• You hate having to do multiple (short) playthroughs for all the content

Impressions

I bought this a while ago after being drawn in by the raw, sketchy art-style then forgot about it for a while. I had some reservations about how good the actual gameply would be since enemies being collections of abstract art doesn't really lend itself to visual clarity, but...

• Exciting as it is to start a greenfield project, adding to an existing one can avoid a lot of infra setup
• Ruby isn't JS
• For some reason you need to add body and a bunch of other properties to a Net::HTTP::Request after initialization rather than just passing it to the constructor
  • It'll quite happily take a body argument, but presumably just makes it a header
  • Which makes it annoying hard to notice something is wrong unless you inspect the request/call request.body and notice it's nil
• Slack bots can't send messages unless they're in the channel, but...

Everything sounds cooler en français

Why

• Creative and sometimes challenging puzzles
• Distinctive art-style and beautiful soundtrack
• Creepy vibes and story
• Easy to pick up & put down for quick sessions

Why Not

• Essentially a puzzle game, so if you dislike those it might not be for you

Impressions

It's crazy to me that this only has ~650 reviews at the time of writing, it's an absolute gem. The art style and music really drew me into the vague story, which is slowly revealed by conversations between a little girl, her shadow and a mysterious...

• I probably should have set up Playwright e2e tests for both projects we're responsible for consecutively
  • Now it's been long enough since the first I forgot the details but feel like it should be easier
  • Doesn't help that this time the React app is embedded in Rails
• Setting Playwright's baseUrl to host.docker.internal:port lets me make the initial request for the index page
  • But then the script/style tags still go to localhost:port since rails server/webpack doesn't know about the docker container
  • Rewriting the host to host.docker.internal fixes the tags, but breaks regular local dev
  • So either...