2026 June Retro

Games

Despite intending to 100% it someday I reviewed Axyz this month as I approached the end of the final (A-side) floppy disk; great as either a second screen game or main focus due to its immaculate vibes. It may have missed as a way to get The Wife into gaming through Kula World nostalgia but it hit me head on.

Another nostalgia trigger (even if it's other people's; I never played Zelda before BoTW) was Mina the Hollower, Yacht Club's first non-Shovel Knight game and apparently one the fate of their studio rested on. It turned out be a pretty great blend of Zelda and Bloodborne, with endless secrets and charm propelling me through to its suprisingly suprising conclusion.

Chained Echoes disappointed me by showing glimpses of how great it could've been without dialogue written by a teen Spacebattles user but ultimately didn't leave enough of an impression for me to bother with the DLC. I had a good enough time to finish it but definitely wasn't looking for more by the end.

By constrast at the end of Sayonara Wild Hearts I wanted more so much that I immediately started another playthrough using the mode which reveals its true indentity as a single, hour-long music video. Just an incredible marriage of visuals and music; I might not have minded buying it at full price despite the short runtime.

Last but not least we say goodbye to TOEM, the best "Wife's in the shower and I want something quick to play" I've found so far. A supremely chill, cozy experience with lots of funny little details to keep you entertained by the simple gameplay loop of snapping photos.

Books

The 3rd Midsolar Murders book provided a stellar argument for not every good book needing a sequel, let alone a sequel to that sequel, while Wanderers had too much real world/contemporary political commentary shoehorned in for me to read past the first few chapters despite me (seemingly) agreeing with the author's politics.

The Angel of the Crows rescued the month by being a fun take on Sherlock as an angel and Watson as his literal hellhound, plus a delightful supernatural version of London which would likely fall apart under the increased scrutiny of a sequel but shall luckily never receive one.

General Life Stuff

The Wife made it back from Russia safely and will hopefully not be making that dangerous journey next year due to pregnancy. We went to a far-off art gallery in Kanagawa to see a smallish exhibition about flowers and that was about it really... Lots of rain on the weekends does not lend itself to busy lives outside of work. Hopefully things clear up before the oppressive heat of Japanese summer takes over the solemn duty of keeping us inside.

Work

A frustrating month; didn't feel like I got anything done and spent a bunch of time messing around with Claude in mobile codebases which would have been better spent learning how to actually write mobile code. The mobile SDKs are theoretically a small part of our team's work and that would be entirely true if at least one of us was a mobile dev, but sadly neither of us are. So here we are just poking LLMs with a stick until they say something that seems to make sense (their whole purpose, even when it's actually nonsense) and seeing if the tests pass.

Using LLMs so heavily makes me want nothing to do with work, but is unfortunately the only realistic way to get side stuff like this done. Even with LLM assistance its been an on-again off-again project for a month and a half; if I wanted to learn mobile dev properly it might've taken me that long full time. Not ideal when these changes are for a low priority support ticket and we have actual feature work to do.

What Went Badly

So the Souls games don't have Steam cloud saves. This was something of an issue for me when I bought my shiny new gaming PC, as I wanted to experience Archdragon Peak in 3440x1440 max-settings glory. But help was at hand! Some random Reddit post suggested a way to enable cloud saves through the Steam dev console; I typed it in and A DS3 save file was in fact uploaded to Steam's servers. Unfortunately that something was not my save file, which had been immediately overwritten by a fresh blank file when cloud saves were turned on. Backups are important folks. 40 hours of DS3 just gone; I was devastated for the rest of the day.

Luckily a friend from Aus was also playing through and seemed to be at around the same point; unfortunately even the most linear Souls game offers plenty of different routes and he was about to fight the final boss while I'd inadvertently accessed a late game area much earlier than him. My mood was saved by the no doubt many people who'd experienced similar issues in the past leading to the creation of a save repository with saves just before each boss and a save merger which lets you change their Steam ID to match yours. I miss out on fighting Old Demon King (unless I download that save at some point) will need to make my way through Archdragon Peak again to fight the Nameless King (not complaining) but after an hour of grabbing miscellaneous stuff the save was missing I'm basically back where I was. Thank you anonymous internet people, and Viktor for seeming to genuinely understand how devastated I was and doing his best to help.

Action Items

Review

At least 3 rides a week

Strava very helpfully paywalled viewing your ride history for the last month so I have no hard data to back it up, but I think I managed at least two a week on average. Considering the number of typhoons and unrelated rain this month that's not a terrible attempt, though of course I could've found 3 opportunities a week if I was really committed. Lets actually do it next month.

One shootaround at Shinjuku Chuo a week

I did this 0 times. In the whole month. Distinct failure.

Make it very clear to The Wife that I did miss her

Apparently I did a sufficient job of this with a score of 8/10, though she (accurately) noted I also had a good time just being able to play games nearly all day for two weeks.

Next Month