Strings

What Went Well

Projects

Plenty of game & books reviews here, not so much progress on any coding projects because of that. Not so much being none, zip, zilch.

Games

SILKSONG IS DONE! What an incredible game, but man it took me a long time to beat. When it came out I wasn't expecting to sink anywhere near as much time into it as Elden Ring, but apparently Team Cherry made a(nother? Didn't finish to original back in the day) 100+ hour metroidvania. Or I'm just terrible at Silksong's combat, which is definitely possible. Either way it's definitely my...

What went well

Projects

• Kept writing this blog
• Some minor progress on the spending tracker, mainly styling the transaction dialog and making it usable for editing as well

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...

What went well

Projects

• Month 3 of regularly posting here!
• Actually made some progress on the spending tracker
  • albeit I'm just porting stuff over from Svelte to React so not a lot of thinking involved

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...

What went well

Projects

• Kept writing this blog
• Nothing else this month haha

Games

Well I was right about Silksong being the main focus in last month's retro; didn't anticipate Hades 2 though. Absolutely crazy those two came out in the same month; both live up to their hype which is incredible given Silksong's 7 year development time and all the memes. Hades was a safer bet since it somehow spent its whole early access at Overwhelmingly Positive, but even given that it's an amazing example of how to make a 'more, but better' sequel. Really...

What went well

Projects

• Migrated this blog to 11ty
  • started adding more of my own to it
  • and started producing a lot more content, not just the weekly TWIL
• Added a 'Links' section to TWIL posts and found a lot of great sites for my RSS feed
  • Feels like I have a steady flow of quality articles to read that I'm pretty happy with now
  • Once you get it set up RSS is so much better than trusting the algorithm, and blogs I like linking to blogs they like makes that much easier
...

Incidentals

• a way to store it more 'narrowly'
• front & back lights
• lock
• cover

Bewildering array of things to think about for someone who (well, my parents) just bought supermarket bikes.

Starting prices for a 'decent' bike seem to be around 70 000 yen, which is mildly insane to me.

Not an obvious source of quality reviews, lots of people on reddit/small blogs. Probably due to the nature of actually reviewing a bike taking time, those that exist don't have great coverage of all options.

Insurance

Is mandatory in Tokyo, you can get it at kobini or by...