Souls Like Strings

Chained to (uneven) mediocrity

Why

• Overdrive adds enough to keep combat engaging
• No grinding required
• The bones of an interesting plot
• Some cool enemy designs, and GIANT MECHS

Why Not

• Dialogue ruins the plot with its unbearable clunkiness
• Little opportunity for build customisation
• Nothing about it wowed me

Impressions

Chained Echoes made a strong first impression and was never really bad (other than the dialogue), but also failed to live up to the game it probably could have been.

Its opening has you jumping between the characters who'll make up your party for...

• Team lunch days are rarely productive
  • This is perhaps not ideal when working on a support ticket with production impact
  • Though I was working on it with the senior on my team in purpose for a couple hours with no luck
• Staring at logs all day is enough to make a person go slowly insane
  • Took a break while staring at logs to solve an easier ticket in the morning
  • Then joined senior in fruitlessly staring at logs from many different sources for the harder ticket
• Fun side note from the easier ticket,...

The Angel of the Crows by Katherine Addison.

This time Sherlock is very much on the side of the angels

I had a good time with this one; always been a fan of Sherlock and this is an interesting familiar-but-not twist on it. As usual Addison is better at teasing worldbuilding than paying it off but since this is a solo book that's much less disappointing than the Teixcalaan series and frees us up to just enjoy filling in the blanks with imagination. Reads a bit like a fanfic and apparently that's how it started, but...

• We used to share logic/components among our web products with an internal package
  • Which explains why when I went to investigate the inner workings of an actively-used legacy product there was basically nothing in the repo
• Troubleshooting an intermittent infinite loop which only occurs on mobile and seems to not send anything to Sentry is not fun
• Remember to reinstall your formatter after uninstalling everything to fix another issue
  • Also you need to reinstall it with :Mason, even if :checkhealth says it's there and fine (at least for my Neovim setup)
• When you...

Vacation vibes without the friction

Why

• Exactly as wholesome/cozy as it looks
• Great for short bursts of playtime
• A bunch of cool little quirky interactions

Why Not

• You're looking for action/a challenge

Impressions

TOEM is exactly what it seems; a chill, wholesome and whimsical journey which is more than the (admittedly fairly cool) destination. The gameplay loop boils down to enter biome -> help x people by taking photos of various things -> get enough stickers to move onto the next biome, which sounds simple but is carried by the sheer amount of...