Souls Like Strings

The Book of Love by Kelly Link.

Desperate Housewives but university first years and magic.

Not winning a Pulitzer, but it was an enjoyable ride. The opening gave me high hopes by teasing an interesting world beyond the protagonists' understanding, then let me down by proving it was still beyond their understanding right up to the end.

Every interesting secret or ability ended up being disgorged in their general direction or handed to them before they even needed to think about it. Need to learn magic by a deadline? Just don't think about it at all and...

An unexceptional story, exceptionally told.

Why

• Beautiful art, animation & music
• An emotional story with a message
• Plenty of delightful little details to discover

Why Not

• You need games to have plenty of action/player agency

Review

Florence is a visual novel where rather than selecting dialog options you interact with the world as the titular character, much more effectively putting you in her shoes.

These interactions take the form of simple mini-games, designed more to align you with Florence's state of mind at that point than to provide any sort of challenge. I don't...

• Don't forget an element is in the page twice, especially if it has an ID and you're trying to attach a click handler using that ID
  • can lead to long, hair tearing debug sessions followed by a lightbulb moment when you call click() directly on the element in the browser console
  • I just could not wrap my head around how the inspect panel could show an event attached to it, with the correct code in that event when expanded, but then not do anything when clicked
  • I guess for elements with IDs the inspect panel just shows the...

After managing to stick to at least one weekly post for a few months I've decided to reward myself with the true purpose of a personal blog - tinkering.

I started off on Hugo with the Bear Cub theme so I had no excuse to put off writing while I worked on 'essential' features, but now it's time to make my personal site a bit more personal.

I settled on 11ty as that seems to be what a lot of the people I read are using, and my brief interactions with Hugo's config/syntax didn't impress me (+ I just...

• You can use radial-gradient to draw circles on the background
• Reminded myself that setting css variables inline applies them to all child elements
  • Since SCSS seems to transpile its variables to CSS variables, could I overwrite those values for consistency?
  • And to provide a proper fallback, as opposed to a default value
  • Or is that a bad idea cos it'll confuse someone else who needs to debug it in the future?
• Sometimes just requiring the user (if they're a dev) to dump a bunch of JSON into a field is better than inventing your own...