Souls Like Strings

Together We Will Go

Together We Will Go by J. Michael Straczynski.

Not sure how to feel about this one

On one hand, 12 strangers getting on a bus for a cross-country roadtrip ending in their collective suicide by driving into the ocean is a pretty compelling setup. On the other, the same things which make it compelling also make it very difficult to pull off. I'm not an author, so I'm not sure how a book like this should be written, but IMO this isn't it.

The overall structure is there I think; you have a varied group of people...

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TWIL January 9th 2026

  • If your Jest tests are hanging indefinitely, it might be a render loop caused by lazy and state/observable updates
    • 'maybe' being the operative word, I still don't properly understand why that was happening
    • but the actual behaviour was never broken and removing lazy fixed it after hours of wall head-butting, so I'll take it
  • Honeycomb does not let you have an SLO covering two separate endpoints, e.g. comparing the successful requests for OTPs to successful uses
    • Seems like a useful feature for... pretty much everything
    • There are a lot of cases where you want compare...
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Sanabi

Cyberpunk revenge Spiderman

Why

  • Stunningly detailed pixel art
  • Unique movement mechanics feel amazing
  • Excellent pacing between gameplay and story
  • The story actually rivals the gameplay for best part

Why Not

  • There's definitely an initial adjustment period to the movement
  • This is a cyberpunk setting, it's pretty dark

Impressions

I came into this expecting a fun action platformer, and for the first ~6 hours that's exactly what I got, with a bonus serving of amazingly detailed pixel art. The core mechanic of grappling feels amazing once you get used to it, thought that took me...

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Citizen Sleeper

Let the dice fall where they may

Why

  • Well written characters with cool designs
  • An interesting story with consistent themes
  • Peaks and valleys of pressure make progress feel earned
  • Role-playing elements are pretty strong

Why Not

  • Themes are arguably a little too consistent if you zoom out a bit
  • Success snowballs, you can be kinda OP by the start of the DLC
  • Some DLC dialogue doesn't seem to change based on your choices

Impressions

Citizen Sleeper starts off as a pressure cooker. You wake up on a space station called 'The Eye' as a...

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Liberty's Daughter

Liberty's Daughter by Naomi Kritzer.

Sadly the rich were not eaten

Beck Garrison lives on the seastead, the classic libertarian dream of a sovereign nation in the middle of the ocean. If one ever made it further than the 'buying a cruise ship' phase. In Beck's universe they made it quite a bit further than that, and the book's strongest point is building out what these seasteads would look like.

A few different 'nations' have sprung up on the converted cruise liners and sea platforms, from the debauchery of New Amsterdam to the unrestrained techno-capitilism of Sal...

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