Souls Like Strings

Freeman's Bizarre Adventure

Why

• The no cutscenes/environmental storytelling very much holds up
• Weapons all have their niches and feel good to use
• Fun sorta-puzzles to break up the shooting, exploration rewarded
• Half Life's Xen may not be great but Black Mesa's is fantastic
• Feels very 'designed'; if you can't decide what to do just look carefully

Why Not

• You don't want compulsory breaks every hour or so when it crashes
• You hate shooters with a passion

Impressions

I never played the original Half-Life, but if the only differences to Black Mesa are a shorter...

I can see why they recommend playing this one first

Why

• The first iteration of the Persona we know & love, but shinier
• Some standout character moments & solid overall plot
• Shadow variety/designs are pretty good
• Theurgies are a cool gimmick; especially for the protagonist
• No mascot!

Why Not

• I felt much less connected to the team/social links than Royal
• Less personal stakes
• Very ambiguous ending; explanation locked behind a DLC only purchasable in a bundle
• Mostly Persona 5 Royal exists & I played it first

Impressions

Reload is a great game in a...

Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata.

Being seen as human is truly inconvenient

Keiko is a 36 year old convenience store worker who has worked at the same store for half her life. The konbini is her safe space from the outside pressures of friends and family who seem intent on her getting a 'real job' or 'settling down'. The book makes it quite clear that Keiko thinks very differently from most people, sometimes frighteningly so, but the structured environment of the konbini allows her to fit in and thrive.

Her attempts to fit in by cooperating...

Games

After yet another fitful FromSoft playthrough my journey finally came to an end with Dark Souls 3. Maybe not the best game in the series (that might still be the original for me) but definitely the best possible ending to it. Friede & Gael can stand alongside Malenia/Rellana/Messmer as peers and there's plenty of fanservice (not that kind) to bring on the nostalgia. I'll likely take a nice long break before Bloodborne/Sekiro since there's so much other great stuff to play; but I'm really glad covid forced me back into Elden Ring & then onto my journey through...

• When picking up a legacy JS project, make sure deps are correctly sorted into 'dependencies' & 'devDependencies'
  • Might save you ~2MB of runtime bundle for nothing
• Sometimes clients will surprise you with requirements like 'we want to limit the user to linking at most 1 institution'
  • In a flow whose whole purpose is to make users link more institutions
• The value for grid-areas is not a single string; it's a number of row-separated strings
• Thankfully (but annoyingly in this particular case) it's rather difficult to hijack the browser back button
  • A certain...