Souls Like Strings

The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera.

The Saint of Bright Doors opens strong and doesn't let up, as a young Fetter's mother rips his shadow from him to make him a more efficient instrument of death aimed at his father, The Perfect and Kind. The first chapter acts as a prologue; chronicling Fetter's childhood of training to be an assassin, before jumping years into the future where he's just another guy in a fantasy New York run by religious fanatics and racists.

The worldbuilding is great; it reveals enough to keep you interested while holding enough...

• When working across teams, be very clear about timelines and progress
  • Or you'll end up in a meeting saying you've been blocked by their lack of progress for weeks while they look like a shocked Pikachu
• I still don't think raising specific exceptions then catching them is a good way of handling errors
  • But it's definitely an improvement over throwing and rescuing a single exception for everything which just shows an error screen anyway after being caught
• Stopping to drink water during your talk adds a surprising amount of time; ~30 seconds per...

The longest pun I've ever heard

Why

• I liked the humour, pretty clever dialogue in places
• Cool aesthetic, fun minigames
• References abound

Why Not

• You'd better like the humour, because it doesn't change

Impressions

Later Alligator is a fun, silly game which accomplishes exactly what it sets out to. You play as a faceless but strongly mob-enforcer coded character who bumps into a hypochondriac alligator called Pat, who's convinced his family plans to kill him at a mysterious meeting they've set up that evening. You have the rest of the day to get to...

Paper Mario with bugs?

Why

• Combat is turn based but interactive, has some per-enemy strategies
• The art style looks basic at first but grows on you
• Light puzzle-solving and platforming mixes things up
• You can dodge random encounters/start with an advantage by attacking first

Why Not

• Nothing about it grabbed me in the first 2.5 chapters
• Pretty easy? I dodged a lot of encounters and never felt weak

Impressions

I grabbed this from an 'Overwhelmingly Positive' Humble Bundle which has definitely reminded me that 'buy stuff other people think is good' is not always...

This is the script for my first ever programming talk, delivered at the Tokyo Rubyist Meetup on April 15th, 2026. You can find a recording of the talk on Youtube (Github doesn't allow files over 1GB), and the slides (which you'll need if you want to see them) are here.

Introduction

Hi everyone, my name's Brett and unlike seemingly every other presenter I have not written a book, made contributions to Rails or used Ruby to write a presentation program I can use to deliver these slides from a Dreamcast. So what makes me...