Souls Like Strings

Man I wish Valve still made games

Why

• The orignal but better
• More variety in scenery/the tools at your disposal
• A lot of interesting lore about Aperture/GLaDOS
• Humour is spot on just like the original, and more frequent

Why Not

• You hate thinking just as much as Wheately

Impressions

The original Portal was a really cool puzzle game with some light story and funny moments to keep you motivated, but there are only so many white-walled test chambers a mute can struggle through. The best parts of that game were when you broke out...

Waifus fight music

Why

• Pretty wide range of difficulties
• Songs play pretty differently to each other
• Enough tracks that there'll be a few which hit for anyone
• Monetisation seems very fair

Why Not

• Not incredibly fan-servicy, but there are some skins you wouldn't want your partner to see you using
• Some tracks require incredibly quick/well timed consecutive inputs, even on easy

Impressions

I took a flier on this since it was ~200yen and was pleasantly surprised; never tried rhythm games before but this probably won't be my last. The presentation and character designs are...

• Building your entire development/testing strategy around LocalStack can be an issue if they suddenly decide to start charging
• I'd definitely much rather write plain CSS than use a framework these days, messing with Oats is just annoying
• If you're gonna delete users in an async job, probably prefer one to multiple
  • having more than one makes it difficult to reason about the order different steps execute in
  • and can lead to actions being taken more than once
• Legacy products have a lot of information about the domain which is likely to be out of date
  ...

Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky.

Now I'm definitely playing Pacific Drive

The origin of the Stalker movie, then the Stalker games and finally Pacific Drive; I can definitely see why it spawned so much different media. Roadside Picnic is a masterclass in pulling you in through what you're not told rather than what you are, little about the Zone is explained, years of time are skipped and major action sequences are cut as unnecessary. The book is more interested in the effects the Zone's bounty has on humanity than glorying in the sci-fi or horror...

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver.

Entertains while teaching

It's not often that being called Demon Copperhead would be considered the least of a person's problems, but that's certainly the case here. Born on the floor of their trailer home to a drug addict mother, young Demon manages to have quite quite a pleasant childhood with his brother-in-terrible-name Maggot until his mum shacks up with a new man. Thus begins the rollercoaster of Demon's life, suffering through awful situations to seize a ray of hope then be brutally shoved right back into darkness.

Get a part time job?...