Souls Like Strings

Magic for Liars by Sarah Gailey.

Noir detective with magical-sister issues goes back to high school

I really enjoyed this one, even stayed up an hour past my usual bedtime to finish it off last night. Ivy is a very human protagonist who's quippy without entering Marvel territory, and the supporting cast all fill their roles well. She's a private investigator estranged from her magical sister, at least until a death at the magical high school her sister teaches at smashes them back into each other's lives.

The cast & overall story are kept tight & focused...

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...

The Night the Lights Went Out by Drew Magary.

Man hits head, wakes up and wants fried chicken

I like the way this guy writes; even though it's kinda performative it's performative in a genuine way, probably something like how I'd write about a traumatic event in my life. There's not really one thing which makes this book interesting; you can read about the effects of a brain injuries, loving families and certainly straight white guys being idiots/in love with meat in other places, but this one pulls those elements together in a compelling way that made...

High concept scribbles

Why

• Genuinely unique art style that somehow works
• Combat is pretty engaging/complex
• If you enjoy having absolutely no idea what's going on

Why Not

• You don't like the art-style
• You hate having to do multiple (short) playthroughs for all the content

Impressions

I bought this a while ago after being drawn in by the raw, sketchy art-style then forgot about it for a while. I had some reservations about how good the actual gameply would be since enemies being collections of abstract art doesn't really lend itself to visual clarity, but...

• Exciting as it is to start a greenfield project, adding to an existing one can avoid a lot of infra setup
• Ruby isn't JS
• For some reason you need to add body and a bunch of other properties to a Net::HTTP::Request after initialization rather than just passing it to the constructor
  • It'll quite happily take a body argument, but presumably just makes it a header
  • Which makes it annoying hard to notice something is wrong unless you inspect the request/call request.body and notice it's nil
• Slack bots can't send messages unless they're in the channel, but...