2025 November Retro

What went well

Projects

Games

Silksong continues to be incredible; now 70 hours in, not even done with Act 2 and still absolutely loving it. I even enjoyed the famously rough Bilewater boss & its accompanying runback (plus pre-boss gauntlet!). Every moment with Silksong feels special, and I'm going to take my time finishing it because once it's gone all that's left is a replay of the original.

In service of taking my time, I spent around 60 hours of it becoming Like a Dragon. I definitely understand why people enjoy the Yakuza series now, such a unique combination of wacky antics, solid JRPG combat and melodramatic but occasionally moving story. Ichiban truly is the ichiban protagonist as well, never stops making me laugh with his solutions/reactions to the situations he finds himself in. I ended up picking up the prologue to the original series, Yakuza 0, since it was about to be delisted in favour of a new 'improved' and more expensive Director's Cut. Probably won't play it for a while though so I don't get burnt out on that particular style of game.

I also played 1000xResist, a great example of a book-quality story which wouldn't have been nearly as good as a book and Inscryption which finally broke my not-Slay-the-Spire curse of not truly enjoying card games.

Books

This was mostly Chronicles of Osreth month, starting at the midpoint with Witness for the Dead then jumping back to the excellent starting point in Goblin Emperor. Now I'm partway through The Grief of Stones and still enjoying Celehar's somewhat peculiar approach to life.

I also took a brief trip to space for a sci-fi whodunnit in The Deep Sky, where the mystery of an explosion on a generation ship mostly serves as a backdrop for a character-driven story.

General Life Stuff

The Fiance finally started driving lessons this month, after realisng there's unlikely to be much opportunity once she's busy being pregnant. She was predictably hyper-stressed about everything to begin with but seems to have become considerably less worried about the concept of driving at least, if not the particulars of doing it well enough to pass a test. She passed the pre-Learner's test first try, which bodes well if she makes it through the upcoming practical exam next Sunday.

We also had an old friend of hers, Dennis 2, over for dinner. He turned out to be a rare example of a non-jaded English teacher (working at a kindergarden no less), and brought a bag of excellent coconut-coated nuts for me to graze on over the next week as The Fiance found them distasteful.

On the Brett's friends front we had a video call with Jenn & Dodd, giving mutual house tours and finding out Dodd's younger brother has 3 (three!) houses in final confirmation that uni is a waste of time and we all should've just become tradies. Seems now that Dodd's schedule has settled down he'll have time for some gaming again, so we have PEAK lined up for the week of December 10.

Speaking of games I played some Slay the Spire, but IRL. I finally dragged myself from the cozy warmth of our apartment to a boardgame meetup and immediately laid claim to the StS board game. After forming a party of 3 other guys who'd played the video game, we spent ~5 hours making it to the Awakened One only to lose horribly. Considerably harder (and longer) than a run of the video game for sure. And that's with me thinking attacks which affect all of a row affect all of all the rows for the entirety of Act 1.

We finally made it to Kokubunji on a non-rainy day and enjoyed exploring around; there was a nice Japanese style circle-in-the-middle park and fancy garden, but the promised 'river' walk was more of a small stream with a sign warning about endemic ちかん. Our annual trip to Showa-Kinen was much more as expected, was nice seeing it a bit later than the usual mid-autumn leaves season. Some of the trees were bare (and those along the entrance promenade were weirdly... angular) but others had beautiful red leaves and it's a pleasant place to be in any season. I'm still hoping we end up moving to Tachikawa for a bigger apartment just so we can go there all the time.

Work

Promotion! Finally! Definitely can't be upset about a 28% raise, glad it lived up to the ridiculously long buildup. Also have some real work finally lined up with implementing OTP login (wanted passkeys but not possible due to very strange practices by a client). Migrating our mess of a Webpack/Rails/React monorepo to a mess of a Vite/Rails/React repo also went smoother than expected (fingers crossed, we haven't deployed it yet) and surprisingly smoother than migrating a plain old Webpack/React app which was more modern in every other way. That one had to be shelved pending TypeScript 5 support and finishing the actual feature work I now have.

What went badly

No complaints this month tbh. If anything I was disappointed by how not thrilled I was with my raise, since I already make enough to not worry about anything short of buying a house and it doesn't move the needle on that, but a very first world problem shared by pretty much all of the non-homeowner first world so しかたない.

Action Items

Review

Starve yourself

Yep mostly did this. Lunch and dinner most days, with an occasional afternoon snack or sandwich. It's possible the cold makes me burn more energy and thus fat, or its possible I'm lulling myself into a false sense of security. Need to be careful since riding is not really a valid way of burning fat for the next few months.

Celebrate your raise

Yep, in direct contravention of the above haha. Had a giant watered down beer, some chicken skin, a bunch of skewers and the customary churros.

Next Month