Souls Like Strings

Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke.

Definitely written in the 1950s by an old white British dude

An interesting answer to "What if aliens invaded culturally, by improving our lives?", Childhood's End works as a title on many levels. The book opens with gigantic, untouchable alien ships appearing over Earth's major cities, proceeds to demonstrate just how superior said aliens are to us then spends its runtime uncritically accepting the alien's influence as positive in a way which leads one to believe the author believes in the British Empire a little too much. Also as with most...

• Yahoo Japan is a completely separate company from Yahoo US
  • Which obviously means they have different API docs for OIDC...
• ID tokens from an OIDC flow are often delivered as signed JWTs, meaning you need another network request to get the keys to decode them
  • Of course you can cache the keys, but caching is not exactly known for reducing complexity
• CHECK IF YOU HAVE A GEM THAT DOES SOMETHING BEFORE WRITING A SUPER DETAILED RFC FOR HOW TO DO THAT THING
  • Also check if there's a more generic gem which...

All the Living and the Dead by Haley Campbell.

You might not enjoy reading it, but you'll be glad you did

Most people spend their lives trying to avoid thinking about death; Haley Campbell may have tried a little too hard to do the opposite. Many chapters in this book lead me to think 'huh, I guess it makes sense that exists' about jobs I never would have considered without reading it. Many chapters also made me more than a little squeamish, or sad, or uncomfortable. Despite this I'm glad I read it, and I think most...

• Skipped last week because of Silver Week + 2 days annual leave
• Git tracks file permissions
• Apple makes it way too easy to find 'developer docs' that read like marketing materials
  • And way too hard to find the actual docs even from there
  • They also steer you hard toward their preferred way of doing things by kinda implying other ways aren't possible
  • i.e. why would I need an app in the App Store to use OIDC against someone's Apple account???
  • but the docs heavily imply this is the case
• If there's an accessor for an attribute...

Games

Clair Obscur achieved the impossible by living up to and even exceeding the ridiculous hype established for it by sweeping every gaming award in existence last year; making me very glad I didn't have to decide between it and Silksong for GOTY.

Denshattack established it as my go-to 'sneak some gaming in while wife is in the shower' game with its bite-sized but insane levels, very shonen anime aesthetic and brilliant difficulty curve.

Future Knight was a cool little throwback in both style (reminiscent of those handheld games you could buy in a supermarket for $5)...