Souls Like Strings

The Bright Sword by Lev Grossman.

A classic Arthurian legend; minus the Arthur.

This book subverts expectations so often that it wraps right back around to meeting them again, but it's still an enjoyable read. As the story takes great pains to impress upon you, Arthurian legends should be filled with gallant knights rescuing damsels in distress and undertaking glamourous quests for King and Country. In this version of Camelot though, the knights are decidedly human with all the vices that entails, the damsels are quite capable of rescuing themselves and the last glamourous quest severely culled...

What if Jesus where a blue haired teenage girl?

Why

• Cozy game which doesn't ask too much of you but provides some nice worldbuilding and story
• Fun core gameplay loop
• Your journal has a cool art style and offers background on the world, incentivising collectible hunting
• Overall art direction is a good fit

Why Not

• A little janky at times
• Combat feels like an absolute chore, apart from one specific enemy type

Impressions

First impressions were great, it's clearly not meant to be challenging but the movement feels fluid, voice acting and art are...

• It's amazing the difference in perceived quality replacing a loading spinner with a skeleton can make
• Migrating an endpoint from only returning a single record to an id-keyed hash of them went smoothly
  • First modified it to accept both the single id and an array of them with different branches
  • Then added a new API call to the frontend which used it to condense multiple existing calls into one
  • Once that was live and known to work in prod, moved all the single calls to the multi-endpoint passing a single element array of ids
  • Finally removed the single...

After spending most of the week trying to get a workflow setup with Copilot/Claude 4 to migrate a bunch of legacy class components to function components, I ended up giving up and just doing it quicker/better myself.

Since we have ~40 class components still in the codebase, my end goal was to set up a semi-automated pipeline we could run them through one-by-one, allowing the team to rid ourselves of a large chunk of tech-debt without the fairly large time investment that would usually require.

I started off by setting up a copilot-instructions.md with some process/code quality expectations about the...

The Assassins Creed 2 of video game sequels.

Why

• All the stuff that made Ender Lilies amazing, with the rough edges sanded off
• New setting and new (slightly) less depressing vibes
• Stronger connections to all your summons as characters
• Satisfyingly links the two games in the same universe

Why Not

• Can feel a little too similar to its predecessor, at least when played back to back

Impressions

A fantastic sequel which takes the medieval fantasy foundation of the original and brings it into the steampunk-ish future. The basic gameplay and premise are the same,...