Souls Like Strings

My Husband

My Husband by Maud Ventura.

The perfect couple

The narrator is just a normal woman who loves her husband. Over the course of a week, endlessly escalating revelations exemplify just how normal and healthy her love for her husband is. I'm hesitant to write about the plot in any detail for fear of spoiling it, not because it's reliant on twists or shock value (both of which are plentiful), but because the journey of perspective you go on as you read is part of the experience. The prose is also excellent, posessing that intangible 'quality' I so...

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2026 January Retro

What Went Well

Projects

Finally decided to give a talk at Tokyo Rubyist and mentioned it to enough people that I can't back out now unless legal just tells me I can't do it. I have until sometime in April, so naturally I'll start working on it once I get back from the honeymoon in late March. Any earlier would be wasting valuable panic-energy.

Other than that the only thing keeping my Github graph green continues to be this blog; I'm pretty sure I'm just a date-filtering system & deploy away from the new spending tracker but never seem...

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The Amber Spyglass

The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman.

Everything is fine, nothing is answered

This one just didn't do it for me, despite not being meaningfully different to the preceding two. Part of it was definitely a bit of ick from two characters I very much saw as kids (Lyra's ~12 in this book!) suddenly being very interested in romance. I mean it makes a lot of sense, most kids are at that age even without the extensive trauma-bonding, but much like their other authentically child-like reactions and decisions it's just not fun to read for me.

Something else...

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TWIL January 30th 2026

  • If you pass a to React Router doesn't know about to Link it'll change the URL but not go anywhere
    • Which means if the page refreshes for some reason, you'll end up where you were going

To my surprise there were quite a few new tidbits here, especially about normal and inline layouts. Hopefully I'll remember it next time I'm confused by block margin doing nothing to an inline element.

A nice reminder...

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In Other Waters

What if world-building was the gameplay?

Why

  • Your favourite part of games is learning about their world
  • If 'intriguing' is a more attractive description than 'fun'
  • You want something chill & different

Why Not

  • Definitely slower paced
  • If you care about literally anything other than learning about the world, there's not much here for you

Impressions

I briefly wanted to be a marine biologist when I was a kid, mostly because I thought dolphins were cool (they are) and I liked the idea of being away from my family for months at a time...

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