Souls Like Strings

Buying a bicycle

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...

Continue reading

TWIL June 20th 2025

  • When a service says they redact PII, trust but verify
  • The 'check' half of 'guess & check' is very important
  • Being able to replicate errors locally really makes all the difference when fixing them
  • You can trigger Sentry errors in prod by editing the browser HTML to add a button which throws on click
    • e.g. <button onclick="throw new Error('test')">Test</button>
  • CI for PRs and trunk should be exactly the same except for deploying, very annoying to merge a PR and have it fail CI
Continue reading

Doom 2016

Doom's modern return is the best kind of power fantasy.

Why

  • Very, very fun
  • Weapon/enemy variety is great and perfectly staggered
  • Frantic pace, all mechanics encourage you to constantly move
  • Looks & runs great on Steam Deck

Why not

  • Bosses can be a weak point
  • You're squeamish
  • You strongly dislike violence

Impressions

This is very different to the games I usually play. Some of my favourites are Baldur's Gate 3, Divinity Original Sin 2, Slay the Spire and obviously souls-likes. All fairly slow paced, deliberate games with excellent story telling and characters. Doom does...

Continue reading

Tainted Grail: Conquest

A story-driven roguelike deckbuilder based on Arthurian legends.

Why

  • Interesting lore, fully voiced
  • Wide variety of playstyles and mechanics

Why not

  • A little easy?
  • Mechanics aren't explained well after first class
  • Exacerbated by janky feeling UI

Impressions

This is a neat little game, and if I played it before Hades/Slay the Spire/with more free time I probably would've finished it. As someone with a full time job and hundreds of hours in two of the best roguelikes made though, nothing about this one stuck out enough to keep me playing.

I unlocked 4 or...

Continue reading

TWIL June 13th 2025

  • enzyme is an alternative to React Testing Library which focuses on the React Tree rather than the DOM
  • Jest can run individual tests or suites concurrently, and so can Vitest
  • Running DOM-based tests concurrently writes all of them to the same DOM (at least by default)
  • This can make it seem like RTL isn't cleaning up the DOM after each test like it should, potentially wasting hours of your time -__-
  • eslint-plugin-jest-dom can tell you when you should be using RTL's custom matchers
Continue reading