Souls Like Strings

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...

Everything sounds cooler en français

Why

• Creative and sometimes challenging puzzles
• Distinctive art-style and beautiful soundtrack
• Creepy vibes and story
• Easy to pick up & put down for quick sessions

Why Not

• Essentially a puzzle game, so if you dislike those it might not be for you

Impressions

It's crazy to me that this only has ~650 reviews at the time of writing, it's an absolute gem. The art style and music really drew me into the vague story, which is slowly revealed by conversations between a little girl, her shadow and a mysterious...

• I probably should have set up Playwright e2e tests for both projects we're responsible for consecutively
  • Now it's been long enough since the first I forgot the details but feel like it should be easier
  • Doesn't help that this time the React app is embedded in Rails
• Setting Playwright's baseUrl to host.docker.internal:port lets me make the initial request for the index page
  • But then the script/style tags still go to localhost:port since rails server/webpack doesn't know about the docker container
  • Rewriting the host to host.docker.internal fixes the tags, but breaks regular local dev
  • So either...

Atonement by Ian McEwan.

Home & Away style drama but compelling characters

When I look back on the plot it seems simple to the point of ridiculousness, but the emotional highs and lows carried me through so well while reading that I didn't notice. I wasn't expecting to get so attached to a bunch of aristocrats and their ward, but Briony, Cecilia and Robbie are all deeply flawed, deeply interesting people trying to do the best they can in the world as they see it.

Unfortunately for Cecilia & Robbie, Briony sees the world as a creative...