Month: April 2025

Are there even any superhero games I could even play without dying any more? My memories of Champions are fond, but I don’t know whether my current brain could handle adding up a dozen d6s and doing double-digit mental arithmetic and counting phases.

Read (novel): The Battle for Medicine Rocks (Rachel Aaron): Finally we get some things explained about the magic crystal caves! Also a little about the necromancy, and various family reunions. Everybody hopes the battle will resolve things in their favor, but they are either disappointed, or will be in the next book.

Written (catgirl): 102. Pathetic, and yet not quite a failure.

Also Hug a Friend Day, National Pretzel Day, National Veterinary Day, and of course Independent Bookstore Day. Sadly, there was nothing I wanted at the bookstore this week, but there has been before and will be again.

Watched (anime): Delicious in Dungeon 12-14: Quest complete! Story’s finished, right? …oh. Also, flashback to Kabru and his followers.

Read (nothing): Nothing, but I have made a huge dent in my physical TBR pile and didn’t buy anything new today, so I’m probably fine.

Written (catgirl): 171, some of it even story and not just notes.

All hail Emperor Maximilian XXIX of the Northern Shores!

But no parades for my digestive tract, which apparently was working up to being really gross and causing me to sit on the toilet in the middle of the night so I could faint onto the floor and break the litter box and scrape up my face and bang my tooth, and also sleep poorly. I stayed in bed until later in the morning, but eventually it seemed like I was enough of a hollow husk of a body to get up and log in to work. I accomplished several tasks, even.

Marith claimed the mysterious shoes, so that’s good.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage 4.12: That was a very silly episode. Maybe Nate should put more work into not being a jerk and less into speaking Football.

Read (anthology): Duties (Moe Lane): Another four-story collection, with a robot who won’t shut up about how gross meatbags are, a dryad, the secret base where the US government sends everything that you might naively assumed would go to the warehouse from Raiders of the Lost Ark, and a frog.

Read (manga): Avant-Garde Yumeko (Shuzo Oshimi): Yumeko doesn’t want to sleep with anybody, she just wants to know what dicks look like. Then it gets weird.

Written (catgirl): 119, still notes. I should probably stop futzing around and write something for real.

If you’re better-dressed than me (which you are), spin around!

Went to the office, ate masaman meatball curry, did some work.

Read (manga): Manhole vol 1 (Tetsuya Tsutsui): Parasite horror, nonconsensual utopian plots, more parasite horror. Points off for the female cop being lame, bonus points for the villain having the courage of their convictions. So many CWs.

Read (anthology): Anagnorisis (Moe Lane): Four more horror or horror-adjacent stories about vampires, haunted houses, demonic possession, and evil books, some with twists.

Read (anthology): Decisions (Moe Lane): Also four stories, about werewolves, the Emperor of California, C19 derring-do, and dating apps.

Written (catgirl): 153.

(It’s a Dr Who reference.) Also the International Day of the Book, International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day, St George’s Day/Slay a Dragon Day, and English Language Day.

Went to the office, ate a fig prosciutto brie sandwich, did some work.

Read (manga): PTSD Radio omnibus 1-2 (Masaaki Nakayama): Many small vignettes of unsettling or actively horrifying things that each show a facet of what’s going on. So far, I’m not sure, but it involves hair, an extremely cursed-looking stone outcropping, and a variety of terrifying apparitions.

Written (catgirl): 124. Still not sure about cell phones.

It’s where I keep all my stuff!

Played (Changeling the Lost): Berkeley 94:Despite Vivian’s hardware betraying her, the group eventually manages to get to Longfingers’s scheduled meeting at the coffee shop with Simple John, Mary, and Beth. (Theophania notices that Mary is excessively hot, which Thessaly doesn’t approve of, so maybe Longfingers will learn entirely the wrong lessons about how to be a grown-up sapphic.) They learn some more about being changelings, and take a trip into the hedge to learn how to make Contracts. Hurray for magic powers! Even if Thessaly is being all secretive about hers.

Read (game): Land of Cicadas: A sandbox setting for Cloud Empress. Some hexes are farmland, some are wasteland, some are perilous forest, some contain giant bugs, some contain the sky-city expedition in search of their missing Cloud Empress, several contain killer robots, etc. There is plenty of scope for hapless wandering PCs to get into trouble, and possibly even cause a tremendous uproar. Or get eaten by giant bugs, of course.

Written (catgirl): 159 of notes.

Hey, where’s my creativity and innovation?

Had to get up early again for the cleaners and then still do work. Bah. Also discovered Mysterious Shoes. The cleaners disclaim them, and Marith says she doesn’t recognize them, but nobody else is ever in my apartment because I’m a failure at people.

Read (manga): Mysterious Disappearances vol 5 (Nujima): All their messing around with mysteries has attracted the attention of the Queen of Cats and her truck-sized minions. Nobody is mean to a cat on-screen, but there is nevertheless cat-related sadness of a familiar kind.

Read (anthology): Covenants: Four Tales of Agreements (Moe Lane):Four stories that are not horror, but are in horror settings. A couple are in C19 Europe ravaged by undead of various kinds, there’s one in the same setting as Ghosts on a Alien Wind, and one in a Mythos far future. Okay, maybe they are horror after all.

Written (catgirl): 160 of notes. Maybe they shouldn’t use cell phones at all? But so convenient, even if they aren’t smartphones!

Er, I mean Easter.

Coworker N is still on vacation, so I had to work 7-13:00. Bah, early! But there wasn’t too much work to do, and the next person logged in punctually, so I was able to trundle down to Monkeycat Towers have Easter dinner with friends and search for the lost art of conversation. It was also very nice, although I feel bad for not being cool or doing things.

Read (manga): Dandadan vol 12 (Yukinobu Tatsu): Alien invasion! Astral travel! It’s pretty much the next part of what was going on in vol 11.

Read (anthology): Revisionary: Four Tales of the Mythos (Moe Lane):More or less the Cthulhu Mythos, anyway. Four stories of terrible things that happen to those who mess with things beyond human ken (cursed books, death-world monsters, interdimensional visitors, New England, etc).

Written (catgirl): 143 more of worldbuilding notes.

Also Garlic Bicycle Day.

Slept in too much, but made the bus to shopping with about one minute to spare. Also gave a little old lady directions.

In the afternoon, I was functional enough to go over to Monkeycat Towers to help dye eggs and clean out leftover adobo. It was very nice, because friends are good.

Watched (anime): Delicious in Dungeon 10-11: Finally, the red dragon!

Read (manga): Reincarnated as a Sword vol 1 (Yuu Tanaka, Tomowo Maruyama, Llo): A random schmoe isekai’d into a magic sword and an orphaned 12-year-old catgirl team up to be highly OP in a generic litRPG world.

Read (novel): Castaways (Craig Schaefer): Teenagers in magic school, in the same setting as the Daniel Faust etc books. Kids who don’t have any better options get sucked into another dimension and enrolled in a magic school that even they can tell is not a shining example of the genre. Bullying, dangerous magic, hardass teacher, reformed serial killer teacher, dangerous wildlife, going off-campus once a year to shop, all the standard tropes. Also interdimensional zwilniks and girl-smooches.

Written (catgirl): 107. This trend is in the wrong direction.

It is very important to be aware of velociraptors!

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage 4.11: Parker seems a little too into that role, although Hardison’s not complaining. Also, I’m not sure that’s a fight Nate should have picked for them, but on the other hand, fuck all those guys.

Read (manga): Nightfall Travellers vol 2 (Tomohi): More exploration of hills and shrines and other spooky places. Maybe it’s actually the other girl who will turn out to be a ghost?

Written (catgirl): 109 of notes.

Celebrate by emitting ultrasonic chirps!

Went to the office again, all the usual coworkers were there, ate okra curry and naan, did some work.

Read (novel): The House Witch (Delemhach): Light novel about a witch who has home powers instead of the normal elemental powers, hiding out as head chef in a castle but beset with problems on every side including his own feelings. Het romance, but there’s a gay side character. Very light novel.

Read (manga): Go With the Clouds North-by-Northwest vol 3 (Aki Irie): After the scenic interlude, we’re back to detective work and also the little brother. Now we know what’s going on with him, and it’s not good.

Read (game): Cloud Empress (watt): Heavily inspired by Nausicaa, but the system is based on Mothership because violence is not good for people. The old was swept away, the new world is mostly uninhabitable but there are people in the few habitable areas and also in poorly-maintained flying cities, sometimes giant bugs swarm everywhere and eat the bones of the dead, their shells can be scraped for the substance that fuels magic, ghosts everywhere, etc. Lots of random tables of different things, in the Mothership tradition. It’s a very sandbox game; there’s no overarching plot, everything is in the worldbuilding.

Written (catgirl): 126 of notes.

I, for one, welcome our mycelial etc etc. Also School Librarian day. We still have those, right?

Went to the office, Coworker D was there, ate beef and gouda dumplings with pickled veggies, did a little work.

Read (manga): Go With the Clouds North-by-Northwest vol 2 (Aki Irie): MC’s best friend from Japan comes to visit, so this is the Iceland Tourism Bureau episode. I do kind of want to go to Iceland now!

Written (catgirl): 134 of notes.

I have not watched any anime today, but I think in general I’m good on this one.

Played (Changeling): Ken’s 90s Berkeley game. Thessaly and Theophania escape from the grotto before the awkwardness grows too intense, at the cost of only one more level of damage for Theo (Thessaly is too cool to bleed everywhere, of course). On his way home from work, Everett is almost run over by somebody in Siddy’s parent’s old pickup who looks exactly like Siddy’s human seeming, but she drives away very quickly, so what’s up with that? Everyone meets back up at the Hello Kitty Warehouse to catch up on their various days, discuss fetches and moral vs faerie seemings and whether Siddy can reach high shelves now, and help Thessaly name the new security ravens.

Read (manga): Nightfall Travellers vol 1 (Tomohi): A middle-school newspapergirl and a new transfer student explore an extremely hilly and somewhat mysterious city to find the perfectly normal explanations for supernatural manifestations that people gossip about. The art is kind of smudgy and watercolory, although greyscale for most pages, which makes the city 37% more mysterious. I am not convinced that neither of the girls is a real ghost, though.

Written (game design): 232. Instead of having to roll damage, or always using the attack that does the most damage, what if any hit takes out the target, but they have resources they can expend to negate a hit. This is like the 1-hp dragon, or looked at another way, turns hit points from a boring single counter into a collection of distinct resources each with their own mechanical significance. (You want to block that arrow? Sure, spend a use of Shining Steel Plate Armor. A lightning bolt, though?)

But humans never look up!

Read (manga): Mizuno and Chayama (Yuhta Nishio): Two high school seniors forced to be on opposite sides of horrible small-town factionalism by family ties have a purely physical lesbian affair in the abandoned classrooms, but of course nothing is ever that easy. Complete in one large volume.

Written (game design): 198. This is probably not what I actually want here, but if I’m trying to simplify, can I get a character’s combat round down to one roll? I think rolling for initiative and having fixed damage is better than the other way around, but maybe I can combine them somehow. Having both fixed damage and fixed defense seems like it might be less interesting.

Congratulations on your children not getting eaten by angels to all to celebrate, I guess?

Gaming was cancelled due to Passover, so I did some extra work instead. It was not onerous, but it was not nearly as fun.

Read (manga): Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! vol 6 (Sumito Oowara): The (unwilling) advent of Voice Girl!

Read (short): “Loneliness Universe” (Eugenia Triantafyllou): A young woman finds that her relationships have changed in an upsetting way, but it’s actually much worse than that.

Read (short): “Signs of Life” (Sarah Pinsker): Estranged sisters reconnect, but one of them has had a much less explicable life than the other.

Read (short): “Marginalia” (Mary Robinette Kowal): What if some of those weird creatures from medieval margin drawings were crawling around your countryside?

Read (short): “We Will Teach You How to Read | We Will Teach You How to Read” (Caroline M Yoachim): Aliens (faeries? robots?) with very fast and extremely multi-threaded cognition attempt to communicate with humans.

Read (short): “Another Girl Under the Iron Bell” (Angela Liu): Even if you’re a famous monk, enslaving demons is risky.

Read (short): “A Stranger Knocks” (Tananarive Due): A young Black couple in Jim Crow times get an offer that is way too good to be true.

Written (catgirl): 237 of notes, mostly questions and blanks to fill in.

Musk is doing his best to make it suck, but his shitshow is transient.

Once again slept until 1030, then got up and did some shopping.

Ken gave us delicious chicken adobo (probably not cockatrice), and we talked to Ayse about kitchen history because Dave was surprised at the lack of kitchens in Ptolus apartments. It was a nice visit.

Watched (anime): Delicious in Dungeon 8-9: The undine, and the gnomes and Nomari. So far this seems to be following the manga pretty closely.

Read (manga): Asumi-chan is Interested in Lesbian Brothels! vol 2 (Kuro Ituski): A near-miss with meeting the girl she’s looking for, so she has to have a threesome and cosplay instead. Still completely lacking in redeeming social value.

Written (catgirl): 437 more of worldbuilding notes, but mostly lists of names.

I have some of those! Victory!

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage 4.9-10: The one where they have to save the day with only an airport as resources and the one where Sterling talks them into stealing a technobabble from a chess tournament.

Read (manga): Leviathan vol 1 (Shiro Kuroi): Scavengers investigate a derelict spaceship while reading the journal of one of the schoolkids who descended right into savagery when the ship was damaged.

Written (catgirl): 234 of worldbuilding notes.

That’s probably what we call YA now?

Didn’t go to the office since I had to catch incoming cases in the morning and didn’t want to risk being late from commute failure (even though that rarely happens) and also because I am very lazy and stupid and useless.

Read (manga): Asumi-chan is Interested in Lesbian Brothels! vol 1 (Kuro Itsuki): College student Asumi’s very “helpful” senpai mentions that her childhood crush who she has never gotten over may be working as a lesbian prostitute, and encourages her to take the obvious approach to finding her. Completely lacking in socially redeeming value.

Written (catgirl): 107, but I have once again reached the point where everything is stupid and wrong and I should start over, maybe this time with proper worldbuilding and not so many superpowers and thinking about characters ahead of time. Or maybe just give up forever, it’s not like any of this is going to ever amount to anything. Ghosts on an Alien Wind did the other genre with underlying cosmic horror much better than I could anyway.

I presume they mean the color, not the performer, but who can say?

Went to the office, had the room to myself because Coworker D is out until next week, ate fried chicken guys, was very sleepy, did a small amount of work.

Read (manga): The Tree of Death: Yomotsuhegui vol 3 (Masasumi Kakizaki): Finally, the boss battle! Also difficult decisions, personality erosion, terrible revelations, etc. The End.

Read (novel): Ghosts on an Alien Wind (Moe Lane): Just a few hundred years before humans developed interstellar travel, everybody in the galaxy was wiped out, leaving dead, hella creepy worlds that could have been full of friends but now have only unknown dangers, nigh-incomprehensible tech, and creeping madness. It’s SF adventure with cosmic horror beneath it, which pleases me greatly. Also the [SPOILER] are real [SPOILER], which is amazing.

Read (manga): I Can’t Say No to the Lonely Girl vol 6 (Kashikaze): They finally come out to their friends, everything is great, the end!

Written (catgirl): 170.

Libraries are the best.

Played (Changeling the Lost): Berkeley 1994. We had no Kelsey, but our (new?) rule is that we’ll play if only one person is missing and it’s not the GM. This session, Everett gets his old job at the railroad back (Brookes rolled like eight successes!), Theophania goes to The Other Change of Hobbit to research horror magazines she could submit and covers for Longfingers sneaking upstairs to find a Hedge door and then meeting the fabled Simple John, Beth, and Mary, then Theophania and Thessaly follow the currents of magic through a theater basement and an abandoned 70s department store and find a one-way(?) pool of water(?) which leads to an abandoned grotto full of magical power (which they suck up for +1 Wyrd and full Glamour recharge each). There we leave them, alone in an extradimensional hideout with only bed. What will happen next week?

Read (short): The Knight and the Butcherbird (Alix E Harrow): Post-apocalyptic monster-hunting knight meets immovable librarian, discoveries about the new world are made.

Read (manga): The Tree of Death: Yomotsuhegui vol 2 (Masasumi Kakizaki): Our Cthulhoid undying ex-cop (really, that character design cannot be an accident) has been helping the shinigami and her mysterious blob for a year, and the enemy is finally closing in and using his connections to mortal life against him.

Written (catgirl): 111.

I’d say this one is for Despoo, but actually beavers are being reintroduced in Britain, which is pretty cool.

I did a small amount of work, but the cats really wanted to help.

Read (manga): Adachi and Shimamura vol 1 (Moke Yuzuhara, Hitoma Iruma, Non): Two schoolgirls end up hiding out in the same spot when cutting class, become friends, etc.

Read (novel): Hell to Pay (Rachel Aaron): I thought this was going to be the end of the war against Gilgamesh the King of Heaven, but no, it’s the huge plot twist where everything gets much much worse. Also, listen to the cat!

Written (catgirl): 137.

Don’t drive when you’re sleepy!

Also Jump Over Things Day, which is just Walk Around Things Day in a different plane, and also something you should not do while driving.

Did some shopping, did some more shopping.

Read (manga): After God vol 3 (Sumi Eno): Main Character is depressed because trying to live her life got a bunch of people killed, but turns out in this world, people still get killed even when she hides in the underground base. Also, some explanation of the gods, but it doesn’t really explain much of anything, so maybe that’s for the best. It’s all horrifying and possibly non-Euclidian, though, and definitely squamous.

Read (short): “Albert and the Water-Horse” (Chameleons All In Vermillion): Of all the ways meeting a mysterious violin-playing woman on the wave-washed beach could go, that’s actually near the top.

Written (catgirl): 148.

If only! We could use a nice alien conquest about now.

Slept in as usual but instead of grocery shopping, I went to the rally downtown because seriously, fuck all those motherfuckers. The crowd was pretty old overall, but there were a few youngsters, so perhaps there is hope for the future. I tried leaving my phone behind, not because I expected trouble today, but to see if it worked, and yeah, it was fine. I think I was the only one who did, though.

Ayse is back from her expedition to Nashville, with bonus tornadoes. Er, stories of tornadoes, she did not bring any actual tornadoes.

Watched (anime): Delicious in Dungeon 6-7: The one where they eat a mimic, and the one where they eat a kraken.

Read (manga): After God vol 2 (Sumi Eno): Less bizarre than the volume that introduced the weird elements, as is inevitable, but more gods and people getting massacred unexpectedly and even more gods and creepy powers and creepy people.

Written (catgirl): 157.

Rats can be cute!

Also Walk Around Things Day, which I guess is for people who normally walk through things?

Read (novel): The Valkyrie Stratagem (Glynn Stewart): Third in the series of civil war (no caps) x missiles in space. The king candidate who escaped the massacre is on the way back with her new allies and new boyfriend, despite the general lack of helpfulness from Earth, but of course it cannot be that easy.

Read (graphic novel): Grimoire Noir (Vera Greentea, Yana Bogatch): A boy in a small sepia town where all the girls are witches tries to figure out what happened to his little sister while the town floods due to his mother’s magical tears, with some help from his estranged, hovering, bestie. Quite a few secrets come to light in the process, as is appropriate to the genre.

Written (catgirl): 267. I think this scene getting bogged down, or maybe was unnecessary from the beginning.

Went to the office, ate a Mediterranean-salmon burrito thing, did some work.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage 4.8: Conning the Mako.

Read (manga): Go With the Clouds North-by-Northwest vol 1 (Aki Irie): A Japanese teenager in Iceland, using his secret psychometry powers to do detective work while his grandpa picks up on the ladies. Lots of Icelandic scenery, people who make the MC’s life difficult, family trouble. By the same mangaka as Ran and the Gray World.

Read (novel): The City That Would Eat the World (John Bierce): In a world where everything runs on the very specific blessings of myriad gods, a god appeared who slowed aging for members of the city watch as long as they were on the walls. A few centuries later, everyone is officially part of the guard and the entire city is walls (except the interstices where the underclass labor and age, but that’s not important) and doing its best to cover the whole world. A disillusioned citizen and an outsider whose home was destroyed by the city’s extractive industries and general capitalist shittiness get stuck taking a god to the West Pole through this bizarre world full of corrupt societies, and doing their best to not suck along the way. There’s a lot of exposition because it’s a very different world, and the main characters are unfortunately straight, but people resisting capitalism is always good.

Written (catgirl): 122.

Another one that’s illegal now, I guess. Also National Walking Day, International Children’s Books Day, and National Ferret Day.

Went to the office, ate some vegetarian curry and flatbread after figuring out which unlabeled lunch was mine, did a work.

Read (novel): To The Bloody End (Rachel Aaron): Conclusion of the faerie vs blood mage in magic cyberpunk Detroit trilogy. Despite gaining immense power in the second book, our heroine still has to figure out how to use it in nonstandard ways to save the world.

Read (manga): God Bless the Mistaken vol 4 (Nakatani Nio): Conclusion of this story about people in a world where reality randomly changes every day. Although does a slice-of-life story have an actual conclusion?

Written (game design): 125.