Souls Like Strings

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke.

Liminal space fantasy

Piranesi (the protagonist, not the book) has a simple life as one of two people left alive in the world, and one of 15 confirmed to have ever lived. He and The Other are scientists, searching for signs of some nebulous 'Ultimate Power' in a series of endless, statue-filled halls which stretch from the sea to the clouds. Despite our only POV being Piranesi's religious reverence for The House, attentive readers will notice things are not as they seem to our protagonist. Eventually he joins us in noticing these discrepancies,...

The Midsolar Murders by Mur Lafferty.

Imagine being so good at solving murders people just keep dying around you so you can solve more.

Just a fun series. You'd think a setting with wasp hive minds, sentient space stations and living rocks which turn into spaceships by drinking the blood of their enemies would be all about the world-building but it's the characters that're the focus here. There still is plenty of quality wordbuilding, it's just relegated to the background where it effectively serves as interesting color rather than requiring you to think too hard about its...

• You can give buttons values in Rails
  • Actually I kinda knew this from seeing 'Submit' in params a bunch of times
  • but never considered using it to save as a draft or not for example
• SQL really cares about trailing commas
• Microservices make testing annoying (again)
  • This time because FDW tables are obviously not available if the 'Foreign' part isn't
  • So had to find and update a test stub SQL file which creates them as regular local tables
• Making a way to configure things through an admin UI can save a lot of...

The End of Everything by Katie Mack.

Quantum nihlism

This was pretty interesting! I'd heard of a few of these theories from random Reddit posts, but the book obviously goes into much more depth and provides some science to back the theories up. I've soured on pop-sci a bit since in hindsight most of the stuff I've read is either pushing the author's political agenda or just has a lot of stuff made up to be more interesting, but this neatly sidesteps the issue by being about stuff which won't happen for billions upon billions of years....

A bit too much lamp-rubbing in this one

Why

• Bright & colorful vibe is a nice contrast to many metroidvanias
• Has a lot of personality, even if not familiar with the (apparently established) characters
• Mostly chill & breezy gameplay...

Why Not

• ...but towards the end RNG takes a bit too much of a role
• Progression gates can be a little adventure-gamey at times
• The biome where every female character ends up in a Slave Leia costume wasn't strictly necessary

Impressions

I may not have finished it, but the 70%ish I did play of Shantae...