Souls Like Strings

Killing god(s) with the power of teenage angst

Why

• Everything about it is slick, stylish and choreographed
• You will get deeply attached to at least a few of the characters, probably most
• It never feels stale over a 100+ hour runtime
• Has a low complexity floor, but Excel spreadsheets worth of ceiling
• Finishing it made me genuinely sad to say goodbye to a bunch of pixels

Why Not

• You despise anime, JRPGs or long stretches of dialogue

Impressions

There are so many great things about P5R, but its flair is likely the one that'll...

The Founders Trilogy by Robert Jackson Bennett.

My YA novel moratorium lasted all of two weeks

In my defense, I'd just finished [Homo Deus](/books/2025/homo_deus.md and wanted something light after the inevitable depression brought on by thinking about the future. I really liked the main hook of the magic system; being able to just argue reality into giving up and letting you do what you want is cool. The protagonist's ability to then argue with the things arguing with reality, and exploit their single-mindedness to convince them to do things they weren't designed for, lead to some highlight...

Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari.

Turns out assuming corporations will be shitty makes you look like a prophet.

I read and enjoyed Homo Sapiens at my fiance's recommendation, so was interested to see where a forward-looking version would go. Unfortunately it mostly went exactly where I expected, since unlike history I consider myself fairly knowledgeable about technology and the horrible ways corporations use it.

This was written 7 years before ChatGPT convinced the general population fancy autocomplete meant AI was finally here, so Yuval is missing an absolute goldmine of practical evidence of the changes...

Very short week this time since Monday was a public holiday and I'm taking Friday off to go on a long weekend trip to Nagano with the fiance.

• Even making a simple change can be complicated if it affects clients
  • Especially if those clients have distributed printed guides to using your service
• Even if it's frustrating, taking the time to make sure other teams understand how to use your features is worthwhile
  • People won't remember that they messed up by ignoring instructions, they'll remember the bad experience
• moment.js is 4MB, and dayjs offers...

A genuinely unique 'card' battler

Why

• Deep gameplay and plenty of replayability
• Makes some big changes to the card battler format that pay off
• Cool pixel art and varied scenarios

Why Not

• You want a game with a clearly defined/visible endpoint
• You're heavily motivated by story

Impressions

This is a great game which clearly lives up to its overwhelmingly positive reviews, but after ~3 hours I'm dropping it.

It's not the game; it's me. The gameplay is great; moving from the typical many cards/few upgrades to few cards/many upgrades (and cooldowns on cards rather...