Souls Like Strings

TWIL July 11th 2025

  • If you're going to have types, don't trick them. No matter how annoying it is to do them properly now, having misleading types will cause someone else a lot more annoyance down the road.
  • Alternating between passing regular props, destructuring them from params, and sometimes using injected props is very confusing. Stick to one.
  • mobx allows you to make properties on a store observable, then components you mark as observers react to changes in observables which affect them.
Continue reading

Cobalt Core

Breaking out of time loops with the power of friendship.

Why

  • Distinct and interesting gameplay for each crewmate
  • Having three for each run + meaningfully different ships opens up a lot of possibilities
  • Funny/charming story & characters

Why Not

  • You don't like card games, roguelites or quirky animal-like characters.

Impressions

As someone whose time to play games is more limited these days, my favourite thing about Cobalt Core was that it had a story with a clear and satsfying endpoint; which left me feeling I'd experienced all the game had to offer. That's not...

Continue reading

TWIL July 4th 2025

  • A database column existing does not necessarily mean it's being used
    • even if it's named after the thing you're looking for
    • especially when working on a legacy application
  • You probably don't want to parse, compress and 9MB of JSON before your React app can do anything
    • You especially don't want to iterate over all that data 14 separate times rather than doing a single loop
  • bundle config shows you all the custom config which applies to the directory you're in, and paths to the files which set it
Continue reading

Ender Lilies: Quietus of the Knight

Smol girl with big スタンド.

Why

  • You like metroidvanias, beautiful art and great sound design
  • You like having varied styles of combat, without any real penalty for switching it up
  • You're annoyed by never knowing if you found every secret, but don't want your hand held
  • You're looking for a focused 15-25 hour experience that leaves you wanting more

Why not

  • You don't like metroidvanias

Impressions

For some reason I went into this one with kinda low expectations, and man was I wrong. The first hour or so pulled me in with the visuals,...

Continue reading

TWIL June 27th 2025

  • It's possible for yarn install to 'succeed' and the package files to not be present in node_modules
  • It's possible for yarn install to 'succeed' and the package files to not be present in node_modules but to be present in your yarn cache
  • It's possible for yarn install to 'succeed', the package files to not be present in node_modules but to be present in your yarn cache and the package files for dependencies of the main package to be present in node_modules
  • If this happens:
    • looking at your node_modules/.bin directory will show a broken symlink from the package name...
Continue reading