Souls Like Strings

Good but not great

Why

• Interesting lane-based combat with different archetypes
• Giant space mechs will always be cool
• Story/characterisation is delivered in a variety of ways
• Whole other game included in the roguelike mode

Why Not

• Voice acting is bland enough it kinda detracts from the experience
• Nothing to make it really stand out from similar games
• Gives you too much leeway; I never felt in danger of losing

Impressions

Another review where I bemoan Steam's binary thumbs up/thumbs down; I definitely can't give a game this good a thumbs down but it also...

I hurl my sentient tumor at you

Why

• Distinctive 'supermarket handheld' style
• Creative enemy designs
• Unhinged (barebones) story
• Kinda easy but keeps you on your toes and has some interesting mechanics

Why Not

• You don't like the aesthetic
• Time limits aren't your kind of difficulty (maybe hard mode addresses this)

Impressions

You'll know immediately whether this game's aesthetic clicks with you; and if you spent as much time as me messing around with supermarket-shelf handheld games because your parents wouldn't buy you a Gameboy it will. The soundtrack is solid & definitely a good...

The Roots of Chaos by Samantha Shannon.

As broad as Game of Thrones but not nearly as deep

Shannon created a pretty interesting world with this series, but unfortunately neglected to fill it with interesting characters. As with most fantasy settings dragons exist and are key to the story, but here they're divided into Wyrms (nasty, evil dragons born of fire) and ... dragons (wise, kind dragons born of starlight).

Wyrms are reviled in Western countries since their religious hegemony (Virturdom, a little on the nose with the naming) is based on the continued existence of their...

• If tests are failing in CI but not locally, maybe check if the remote version is rebased on trunk and local isn't
• When picking work back up after a break, make sure you've refamiliarized yourself with what it's meant to do before testing
• Also be sure to remember which environment you need to run checks against before you spend time getting a staging check working when it should be checking prod
• OIDC is basically OAuth but you get an Identity Token with/in addition to your Access Token
  • Google's recommended implementation doesn't work in anything but Chrome
  • LINE has...

• OAuth redirects only require rendering HTML if the user isn't already authenticated
  • Most people only interact with our user service through OAuth/SAML
• We just kinda leave SSO References around after deleting the relevant IdP, seems strange
• Confirming things is a good idea; I was right that locale controls the language for unauthenticated pages but not for authenticated (all that matters)
• Checkly seems cool so far as a way to automatically run uptime/e2e-ish checks against prod
  • You want to write tests a little different compared to e2e though, since resiliency is more important than faithful user...