2025 October Retro

What went well

Projects

Games

Mostly more Silksong & Hades 2; man those are long games. In Hades I finally finished off Typhon, then beat him twice more, while beating Chronos is a given unless I crank the fear way past 10. Two more Typhon kills and I'll have the ingredients for what I assume are the incantations which start the leadup to rolling credits, but I'm waiting for the first post-launch update since it apparently adds new content to the (apparently unsatisfying) ending.

I'm ~60 hours into Silksong and still have plenty left in Act 2; could probably finish it pretty quickly if I just focused on getting the last song but I'd rather take my time and enjoy a generationally great game. Hopefully Team Cherry works on something else rather than just riding off into the sunset with their millions.

Our new couple game is Haven which comes highly recommended for its writing and at least so far seems pretty accessible for a non-gamer partner. It's also nice to play a couple game where the focus is on a (seemingly so far) healthy relationship rather than repairing a broken one (as great as It Takes Two was).

Speaking of broken things, I got it into my head that I'd rescue Hirogami from its ignominious launch by picking it up on a 35% discount after a major patch meant to fix its issues, then using my (immense) platform to promote it by... writing a positive review no one will ever read. Unfortunately its undoubtedly cool concept and visuals (you're a piece of origami paper who can fold themselves into various animal shapes to get their abilities Kirby-style) are outweighed by an annoying fixed camera perspective and boring gameplay, so I ended up refunding it.

Also knocked off Lucah: Born of a Dream which had a crazy art-style and Shady Part of Me which was an amazing puzzle game with cool vibes and cool French voice-acting. That studio's next game is a metroidvania with a similar art direction called Mio which should come out sometime this year, and I'm definitely looking forward to it after seeing what they can do in Shady.

Looking forward to picking up Dispatch in December once all its episodes come out and I picked up the first of the new Yakuza games for my November JRPG; it seems pretty fun so far. Very dramatic/lots of cutscenes but it's pulling me in despite the Home & Away style drama.

Books

Life

The Fiance has gotten way more into Breaking Bad than expected; seems it's good enough to pull in even someone who'd usually hate that kind of thing. Looking forward to watching Better Call Saul with her since I didn't end up finishing that when I watched it alone. Hopefully she'll be similarly into driving lessons, which she's now signed up (and paid (so much :O)) for. They don't start the actual driving part till mid-late November, so looking forward to hearing all about it.

As alluded to earlier we finally made it to Yokosuka, some nice parks/museums/beachside areas but still nothing close to Australia for the latter. Definitely very Americanized, half the businesses cater explicitly to Americans (rentals for soldiers, second hand dealerships for imports etc.) and the Dominoes in the city look way more American-style than they upmarket image they have in the rest of Japan. Ended the day with a walk along the seaside/visit to a cool museum with a different children's book exhibit to our usual in the north of Tokyo which was nice, coming home to discover a whole bunch of burst blood vessels on the back of my legs that looked like a horrible rash less nice. Still not sure what caused that but they're gone now so I guess it's fine.

We also started the process of getting our 'No Impediment to Marriage' certificates so we can officially tie the knot next year; or at least The Fiance did. Turns out getting the certificate from Russia is considerably more involved that the Australian embassy's "send us a letter and you'll have it within a week", not surprising given the war I guess. Hopefully we'll manage to get it sorted, make the trip to city hall then collect our special marriage days off and use them to go to Italy. History! Culture! A variety of delicious cheeses!!

Work

Didn't cause any incidents this month, and delivered some features. Found out I won't even know how much my raise is/if I'm even promoted until potentially just before next payday though which is less than ideal. I think it was almost 6 months ago now my skip-level said I had it in the bag haha.

Got all excited about working on a green-field project (to force CS to create tickets in a specific format lol) but the senior on my time accurately pointed out we could just integrate it into an existing project and save a lot of time haha. Less exciting for sure but with how much time I wasted wrestling with details of Jira/Slack APIs (plus my own stupid mistakes; you cannot pass body to a request initializer in Ruby & expect it to become the body) it was definitely a good call.

Otherwise just kep getting e2e tests set up for the project which doesn't have them yet, they now run in CI and are slowly being transformed from unit tests with huge setup overhead to actual e2e tests. Still no screenshots though, my work on the first frontend project I had at Moneytree ensured I'll think very carefully before ever using screenshots in an e2e test.

What could go better

Action Items

Review

Get off my butt

Nope, not really. Was my least riding in a month by far, probably rode less than 10 days rather than missing less than 10. In my defence it's already getting cold, and it rained quite a lot. Guess I'll be putting on some winter fat until I start riding again in Spring next year.

Don't burn out blogging

Yep, mission accomplished. Sometimes I take a while to write something, but mostly I get it done within a day or two of finishing and I always have something for TWILs. Plus I enjoy writing this stuff; even if no-one ever reads it writing my thoughts down forces me to examine what I really think about or learned from stuff.

Enjoy my week of gaming

Did not realise it was actually 3 days of gaming because of a public holiday on the Monday/The Fiance's birthday on the Friday but I still had a good time, both gaming for 3 days straight and hanging out with The Fiance on the others. We finally made it to Yokosuka and I had some very American-sized mac'n cheese.

Next Month