Souls Like Strings

TWIL June 26th 2026

  • 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,...
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The Angel of the Crows

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...

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TWIL June 19th 2026

  • 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...
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TOEM: A Photo Adventure

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...

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Wanderers

Wanderers by Chuck Wendig.

Too real for my liking

An interesting premise submerged under ham-fisted writing and near constant political commentary. I agree with they guy's politics but I don't read fiction to see fictional worlds ruined by the same petty right wing bullshit the real world is, without even the benefit of any interesting changes in the setting. I did only make it a few chapters in so maybe later on there's something to make the constant commentary/events seemingly ripped straight from real life more palatable, but with so many other great things to read I...

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