2026 August Retro

Games

Not too many reviews since this was very much the month of Clair Obscur, which I've technically finished but not 100%-ed as I write this. Will hold off until then to write the review because man it certainly has a postgame.

Black Mesa gave me some insight into why Valve was such a big deal as a developer before Steam became a money printer, delivered noticeably more graphically palatably than the original.

Of the Devil's first episode was much slower paced than the demo but paid it off with a deeper storyline & mystery, while Gorogoa was a very unique puzzle game which I constantly couldn't help thinking must've been hell to design.

Finally, at the start of the month my annual Persona Summer came to a close with Persona 3 Reload failing to live up to its older brother but still providing a solid Persona experience for me to sink many, many hours into.

Books

The Wife and I started a mini book club to read Convenience Store Woman, only half a year after she said I should wait and read it with her :P. Meanwhile A City on Mars made it abundantly clear why off-world settlements are neither feasible or desirable any time soon and Like this but Funnier provided a mortifying but somehow relatable train wreck made of bad decisions.

General Life Stuff

Pretty standard month outside our one weekend expedition leading to an accidental walk through an uncomfortably long stretch of soaplands followed by the first legitimately torrential rain we've been stuck outside in. The lady half of our Russian friend couple also came over to watch Little Miss Sunshine, which had its moments despite theoretically being centered around a child beauty pageant.

Work

Another month of waiting on another team to do things, but at least I managed to drop all the runtime dependencies from our public Javascript SDK and make similar improvements to the internal packages our team is responsible for. A 30MB decrease in install size is not nothing, even if some of the stuff in there was pretty egregious. Happily it looks like we might be so slammed with work in the next few months I'll have plenty to do, but I've thought that before and not seen it come to fruition.

Action Items

Review

Ride at least as far as I did in July

171 vs 217km, but hard to be too mad about it since there was a typhoon for most of a week and I started working out at home a bit again.

2 home workouts a week

Not as much as I was supposed to though haha, I think I managed 5 all month and some were pretty half-hearted because the first one left me so sore. Will need to do better next month.

Find another far-off place I wanna go and ride there

No good, my lust for exploration appears to have been slaked by a single night time journey to Futako-tamagawa.

Next Month