Month: October 2025

Not sure what nation that’s from. Atlantis? Shangri-La?

Watched (animation): Hazbin Hotel 2.1-2: It’s finally here! 2.1 is the equivalent of the episode 14 recap in anime, which is fine, it’s been a while since season 1. 2.2 is where it gets going, with Sir Pentius in Heaven, which has some definite flaws. Also there’s obviously no continuing moral education requirement, although “Gravity” is a banger of a song and video. And WTF is up with Lilith?

Read (manga): Chainsaw Man vol 19 (Tatsuki Fujimoto): Death! Dismemberment! Trauma! Disappointment! Hand jobs! More trauma! More death! Conceptual warfare! It is all extremely fucked up, both in how the world is and what people are doing to cope.

Written (game design): 259:

The skill levels from old Hero would, in our new system, be 1 point
(either one skill or a couple of skills), 2 points (all skills based on
a single characteristic), or 4 points (all skills). An overall level
that can be used for combat as well would be 5 points, and attacking is
just skills. So we could say a background that’s boring, I mean not so
useful for adventuring, costs 2 per +1, one that’s pretty useful costs
3, and omnicompetence (my background is that I’m Literally Batman) is 4,
leaving the decision of what’s less useful and more useful in a given
campaign to the table. Likewise, conflicting views of what’s included in
the same single-word descriptor can be settled by reasonable players.

But, is it Hero? Maybe it’s not. We consolidated characteristics, but
they’re just as concrete as before. Maybe making skills looser is the
wrong approach here and we should leave the skill list as is.

The base 11- for a skill costs 1 point regardless of what kind of skill
it is (except attack), but another point would get +1 for a full skill
and +2 or arguably even +3 for a knowledge or professional skill, which
is a little awkward if a skill level covers some of each. Do skill
levels not include knowledge skills? Just pay 1/2/3 points for a
11/14/17- with a specific skill? Is it bad to not have the intermediate
values? 6E only has even values for Stun and multiples of five for End,
so maybe it’s fine.

What, you think I make these things up?

Went to the office at the right time, did some work, ate some pig meat on a bun and potato salad, stayed late for a meeting with Boss³ M about how things are going to work differently here in our brave new world of helping customers without other departments.

Read (manga): The Lying Bride and the Same-Sex Marriage Debate vol 1 (Kodama Naoko): A lesbian office worker’s lonely apartment is invaded by an acquaintance who needs a place to crash while on the outs with her husband, which makes her off-limits in two different ways despite being excessively cute. Feelings ensue.

Written (game design): 412:

We can then have defense levels against other skills: Resist Temptation,
Resist Fasttalk, etc, all with the same mechanic. We’re so clever.

What skills are there for attacking? 6E has OCV as a single
characteristic, which you can then increase for specific powers or
maneuvers or whatever. +1 OCV is more expensive than +1 to any
skill, but about the same as a medium-sized skill level (5 points).
Maybe Melee Attack and Ranged Attack are the skills? In 6E, +1 to two
skills is 4 points, although only 3 as a skill level.

How do we even buy skills now? What skills are there? Do we need to be
as fine-grained as Hero? Probably not, but that may be different for
different campaigns. There aren’t characteristics to base skills on, so
maybe it’s all levels. Are levels bought in ranks too? If everything is
actually levels, that might make sense, but if we have individual bits
like familiarities, then maybe only characteristics and powers are
bought in ranks. The main point of ranks is to simplify adjustment,
which doesn’t come up much for skills.

I was thinking we could have backgrounds instead of skills, like Soldier
11- or Mad Scientist 14-, with a cost depending on how much it covers,
quantified in some fashion that I don’t yet know. The system for
quantifying coverage might be an awful lot like asking which individual
skills it gives you. Rolling them together into a background could still
be worthwhile since it would cover any minor bits between the skills.

Maybe break out the different things people do with skills (persuade
people, analyze evidence, use equipment, etc) and for each of those,
rate the background on whether it lets you do that in
no/few/several/most/all circumstances? Then if you just want to do a
specific thing, you can buy a background that does that in all
circumstances and the rest in no circumstances. I like this in theory,
but it may be running into the same problem with pigeonholing all PC
activities into equal-sized boxes that we originally had in the fantasy
game. But the boxes don’t have to be equal, we can charge more for the
bigger ones! But but, how do we calculate the costs with our big chunky
points? Have I failed already?

Technically it’s International Internet Day and National Cat Day, but the Internet is for cats.

Also it’s Republicans are Bad for the Economy, Actually, Day. 96th anniversary.

Betrayed by transit, eventually made it to the office, nobody was there, ate an Indian food, did some work.

Finally logged into Kit’s Discord, immediately ran into people from the Old Old Days. For whatever reason, they don’t hate me.

I need to learn to manage being on multiple discords. Reading everything is a lot!

Read (manga): Go With the Clouds North-by-Northwest vol 7 (Aki Irie): We do get a small cutscene to Lilja in Iceland, but mostly it’s still Kei in Japan, looking into Michitaka’s backstory, and it’s just as messed up as you might expect.

Written (game design): 176:

(Yes, I am aware that making the cost of a generic power 4-5 points
would make a +/-1 cost change a lot like a +/-1/4 modifier. But I
invoked the gavel emoji, so we’re stuck doing this way until the
appeal.)

Looking at other signature Hero things, what exactly should be done
about OCV vs DCV? Ideally we’d have one mechanic for resolving attacks,
skills, and any other success roll, but do we want the simple roll-under
version, the complicated target number version, some other version?

A compromise would be to have an attack skill, or skills, that you roll
under, with each point of defense being a -1 penalty to the skill (or
add 1 to the roll, whatever). Attack 11- would be the equivalent of OCV
3, 0 defensive levels would be the equivalent of DCV 3. This frees the
malicious GM to apply penalties to other skill rolls, but there’s an
obvious and easy default of -0, which might cut down on the handwaving.

Observed.

Closed some long-running cases, talked to New Boss T about training budget.

Played (Changeling the Lost): Berkeley 94:

Lacking leads in the material world, Thessaly decides to scry for
the Lost Queen of Winter’s box under the cypress trees, using a
crystal pendulum and a map. Since Longfingers, Everett, and Theophania
all have jobs (in fact, Everett is busy with work for this entire
session), they are easily able to obtain these things.

After a moment’s thought, it is realized that the best place to perform
this divination would be the Winter Queen’s old grotto. This means
sneaking back through the upstairs of the bookstore next to the old
department store, which means Siddy feels her obligation to return the
bag of weed she swiped some time ago. Fortunately the budget will
stretch to a few boxes of brownie mix.

When Thess tries to divine the location of the box (technically, the
lock to which the key they have belongs) in the Berkeley Hills, the
pendulum refuses to give a location. When she lets it swing freely,
though, it settles on a street in south Berkeley that she knows very
well, because it’s where Sean lives.

No one can think of a good reason for Sean to have that particular box,
and Thess refuses to believe it could be coincidence, so in a fit of
unchangelinglike reasonableness, they decide to go ask him about it. On
the way out, Siddy drops off the special brownies for the bookstore
guys, but then in a rookie mistake she sticks around to harvest some
Glamour from them.

With the now completely baked Siddy, the group make their way to
the apartment where Sean lives and was having a pretty good day
until a gang of weirdos showed up to give him shit and ask about
his sordid romantic past. It turns out he knows exactly the house
with cypress trees everyone is looking for, because he had a brief
affair with James, the (once and future?) Prince of Spring.

James is probably not the kind of person they can just walk up to and
ask about Secret Changeling Monarchy Stuff, so they spend the rest of
the afternoon chilling at Sean’s while Siddy braids Theophania’s hair
like a particularly stoned spider weaving a web.

 

Read (graphic novel): Princess at Midnight (Andi Watson): A small girl’s dream picnics with dragons and pretty dresses are interrupted by Military Adventurism.

Written (game design): 363:

There were a lot of maybes in all that waffle, let’s try to sort some
out.

I had put the cost of 1d6 damage at 2 partly because I wanted to leave
the option of buying 1/2d6, but if we do go with ranks, then is one rank
of Blast going to give 1/2d6? That makes the standard 10d6 superheroic
attack 20 ranks, which is a lot. I think increments of 1d6 are fine,
even if I did initially buy my Kaiju Academy character 1 1/2d6 Str. Does
that mean a rank of Blast costs 1 point? That might be too chonky even
for me, but we can leave the decision until we figure out whether
there’s anything that costs half as much per rank as Blast.

Do we even really want ranks instead of active points? It makes
adjustment a lot easier, but you can’t really put a -1/4 limitation on
the 2 point cost of a rank without going back into fractional points.
Either the limitation has to be on the total cost, in which case it’s
not that different from active points, or we have to add/subtract the
cost per rank, which is a lot like having only +1 advantages and -1
limitations (though not exactly).

Do we need +1/4 advantages and -1/4 limitations? Maybe that
can be swept under the skirts of special effect, but +1/2 or -1/2
(armor-piercing, costs End) is big enough that it should be accounted
for. Even if we put the modifiers on the whole cost, identifying ranks
as the units to be adjusted is still worthwhile, though, right?

What about powers like Barrier, which in 6E have multiple attributes to buy
(size, Body, Def)? Does one rank get you X, Y, and Z of the different
attributes, and if you want less than that, take a limitation? That’s
pretty much how Entangle already is in 6E, so sure.

Gavel emoji. Buy powers in ranks, apply modifiers to the overall cost.
(What do you mean, “what about adders?”?)

Even if we’re not in the UK, Nightvale can have a day.

Read (manga): Go With the Clouds North-by-Northwest vol 6 (Aki Irie): Nobody was expecting that! Also, instead of LiljaxKei, we get Japan.

Written (game design): 198:

FIXING CHAMPIONS

Before I tried to improve D&D, I was working on improving Hero, so some
of this may seem familiar. Most of it will seem stupid, of course. But
things I want to do:

Make points bigger. If we keep 1d6 Blast/HA as the fundamental unit,
make it cost 2 points instead of 5. Maybe even 1, but that might
be too chonky. This may be very unpopular with people who like to
calculate to fractions of a point.

Along with that, instead of an active points value that can be
whatever arbitrary value, buy powers in ranks, like M&M. This makes
adjustment powers easier, and adjustment in general easy enough to use
more generally (you’re underwater, knock two ranks off your fire
powers). Cost per rank could be done in 1+Adv/1+Dis like existing Hero,
or a simpler method where advantages just move the cost per rank up or
down by one, and go into 1/2, 1/3, etc below 1.

Apply this to characteristics too. It was the 80s, nobody had a better
idea how to define characters than D&D’s model of numbers that give
benefits or penalties at certain points according to a table lookup, but
we can do better now.

Now that 6E has ditched figured stats, we can get rid of characteristics
that are just pre-defined skill levels (Int, Dex, Con, parts of Pre
and Ego). Make them actual skill levels, let the player pick what
skills go in them. The characteristics that have effect rolls (Str,
Pre for presence attacks, make Ego analogous for mental attacks),
or that don’t have rolls (OCV, PD, Stun, etc) can stay.

Except End, which is unnecessary. Use Stun for major fatigue, ignore
minor fatigue or abstract it into post-12 antirecovery. (Also get rid of
post-12 recovery, it just makes fights drag on. Adjust other values to
make fights take a reasonable amount of time.)

Con rolls don’t come up much, and it would be easy to say that you’re
stunned if you take more than X% of your Stun in one hit, so maybe Con
can go too, or be combined with Stun and Body in some way.

Do we need both Stun and Body? Again, it’s the D&D model, derived from the
wargame model where the difference between being able to withstand 3 or
5 volleys of grapeshot was an essential stat for your unit. Hero isn’t
nearly as life-or-death, even in the non-Champions games, but there are
still murders. Maybe we can combine them and Con all together into one
characteristic, which again you can buy with limitations if you really
think you should have a disproportionate amount of one vs the others.

Regardless of how we implement this, there shouldn’t be different
mechanics for killing attacks or other kinds of attacks.

1d6 of damage costs 2 points, but 1d6 of Strength costs like 3 or 4,
because it gives you so much more than just punching.

Combine PD and ED into just plain Def. If you have a special effect that
should give you more Def against certain attacks, buy it with a
limitation like you would anything else.

Get rid of Spd entirely: no paying character points to get to play more
of the game! Multiaction rules are where it’s at.

Complications don’t give a wodge of points up front that you hope (or
fear) are justified by how often it actually comes up, they give XP when
they do come up in play. This may or may not be the only way to get XP.
Strictly mechanical advantages (Susceptibility, Vulnerability) may be
exempt from this.

Remove the 11+OCV-3d6-DCV thing for attack rolls. Possibly OCV+3d
vs DCV+10, although that opens the door to target numbers for skills,
and as previously established, I don’t like that since it usually
gets handwaved instead of being used in any consisten or rigorous
way, so why bother? It might be okay if we give characters a “DCV”
for every domain so rolls are rarely uncontested, but it might not.
Needs more thought.

Stun being the total of the dice and Body being the number of dice plus
the number of 6s minus the number of 1s is elegant, and
I can’t deny that rolling a million dice is fun for the person doing it,
but waiting on them to add those dice up in two different ways
is much less fun for the rest of the table. Can we somehow make
success rolls also determine the effect? Like, Stun is 3 per die, plus 1
per die for every 6 that’s showing on the success roll? Does this remove
more total fun than it adds? The can of worms that is rich dice
mechanics was already cracked open by counting Body.

Like the fantasy thing, I want to move away from individual 5′ squares
for movement and positioning, and have zones instead. Full move gets you
to an adjacent zone, half move gets you somewhere inside your own zone.
Super movement can get you multiple zones away. Within a zone, you might
be engaged with one or more people, in which case their no-range powers
can affect you. Otherwise they need a power with range of same zone, or
with 1 or more zones of range.

Possibly instead of buying X zones of this movement mode and Y zones of
that one, you should buy the maximum number of zones you can
move, and then adders for each movement mode. Most of the utility of
Flight comes with its minimum cost, after all. If a mode has less
movement than the max, its adder gets a limitation.

Yes, intersex people do in fact exist! Fuck off, gender binary essentialists!

Played (Hero 6E): Kaiju Academy. Our characters mostly did get finished over the past two weeks, so we were able to play the first day of school, find mysterious drafts in our rooms, get our clocks cleaned by horrible bug monsters, and get send to remedial ass-kicking lessons. It’s Hero, so we don’t level up, but we got 10 XP, which was pretty sweet. Mallipattra did get to lick someone, but was not really enough of a horrible little goblin. Also she flashed the entire dorm because there was a huge venomous bug (maybe also poisonous, she didn’t lick it) in her nightgown.

Read (manga): Wakaba Won’t Give Up! vol 1 (Konkichi): I’m sure this is an unfair opinion, but it mostly seems like a knock-off of Tomo-chan is a Girl!, which was mid to begin with.

Written (game design):  758. This is stuff that I have been thinking for a while but had not written down in a way that got counted.

Pretty sure a pastrami cheese melt counts.

Tried to take books to the used book store, but the Internet said it was likely to rain and I can’t make my wire granny cart full of paper bags of books at all rain-proof, so that will have to wait. Did the usual shopping, got many new volumes of manga to read because I still haven’t converted to digital for that.

Ayse is sick again, so no cake this week. Maybe next week, if she can recover her health.

Watched (anime): Apothecary Diaries 1.16-18: Maomao solves a puzzle with Deduction instead of PS: Apothecary, then some more of her mysterious past gets dug up (although she doesn’t know it yet). That one character really needs a lingering, painful, and incurable accident.

Read (manga): Monster-Colored Island vol 1 (Mitsuru Hattori): She’s never been off the island and has no friends. She’s just run away to this remote island and is a total tsundere. Together, they awaken a mysterious supernatural force by making out in front of its shrine.

Written (game design): 347. Making a Hero 6E character reminded me of all the things I want to fix in Hero.

Holy crap, stop giving them ideas!

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage: Redemption 3.6-7: The one where Harry has to charm a dude, and the one where a speed trap catches more than the corrupt mayor bargained for. Bonus points for the villain in ep 6 being bisexual without any particular comment, and Harry going out with him without any comment, but points off for, well, villainous promiscuous bisexual. More points with no deductions for OT3.

Read (manga): Komi Can’t Communicate vol 35 (Tomohito Oda): 97/100! Everyone would befriend again!

Written (Fantasy Hero): Finished up a 100-point character, sent it off to be picked apart.

Happy Happy Ayse Day!

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage: Redemption 3.5: The one where Tara helps them steal a Sophie Devereaux.

Read (manga): Go With the Clouds North-by-Northwest vol 5 (Aki Irie): The three legs of this series are Icleand, Lilja/Kei, and Michitaka’s crime drama, and in this volume we get all three. Also some shorts from the PoV of non-Kei characters.

Written (Fantasy Hero): Fiddled around some more. I’ll say it counts, but it wasn’t much.

YEAHHHHH!

No, too loud.

Doing evening handover this week, so didn’t go into the office. Did some work, though. Caught up on journaling (hi, Rachel!). Processed the one last box from under the table next my work desk, it was mostly books.

Read (manga): Go With the Clouds North-by-Northwest vol 4 (Aki Irie): Some creepy Michitaka stuff, and then a bunch of Kei and Lilja being ridiculous at each other.

Written (Fantasy Hero): Mostly completed a character sheet, and wrote 154 of past-life explanation. These points are too small and fiddly.

I, on the other hand, did not babble, because I barely spoke except to the cats, and that’s too mushy to be babbling

The apartment manager finally replaced my janky doorknob with a nice new one that just… turns. It’s so nice.

Cleaned out some more boxes, recycled a bunch of VHS tapes from the last millenium, put more things in bags, and felt accomplished even though it was a tiny amount of work. No idea what to do with all these digital circles, since the used bookstore doesn’t want them. If I were smart, I would get a DVD/CD drive and a bunch of external storage and a new computer, and then rip them all, but I’m probably not.

No gaming. Next week for sure, I hear.

Read (manga): Chainsaw Man vol 17-18 (Tatsuki Fujimoto): Cult implosion! Riots! Tax-funded murders! Vivisection! The end of the world (prophesied)! Looks like the disads that paid for Denji’s power weren’t free points after all.

Written (Fantasy Hero): Finally put the pieces together into the start of a character sheet. The file is 472 words, but some of that is from yesterday and a lot of it is boilerplate, so I wrote “some” today.

 

Or maybe sloths just don’t write because they keep putting it off? No, that’s Procrastination Day, which is tomorrow.

Did some work, but also was inspired by pocket fronds talking about cleaning out elderly relatives’ homes to clean out my own home. I got rid of a few bags and boxes, and transferred the contents of others to bags for the used book store. Maybe I’ll even do more tomorrow!

Read (manga): Devil’s Candy vol 4 (Rem, Bikkuri): This is finally getting past where I read online. Kaiko isn’t the best, but she’s okay. Methia is horrifying, and maybe also so is Elliott? Clarence finally gets to be cool.

Written (Fantasy Hero): Spent all evening trying to remember how Hero works enough to write up a character for Kaiju Academy. I’m not sure how many words were actually created, since it was mostly scribbled notes, but it was a creative endeavor that I focused on for a while, so I’m counting it as a successful day.

It me.

I got up to take my morning medicine and make sure the cats had food, then tried to go back to bed, but it didn’t really take, so I was up earlier than I resigned myself to, if not as early as would have been ideal. I put on my dorky clothes and did some errands and some other errands, so I guess that was good even though I was mostly pretty useless.

Read (manga): Devil’s Candy vol 3 (Rem, Bikkuri): Also Hitomi is great. So is Echo. Everyone else is ridiculous, if sometimes murdery. So maybe if TFOS had killing attacks instead of only cartoon attacks, but also mad biotech medicine. And was more metal.

Written (catgirl): 117.

Exactly what kind of person is scared of anti-fascism?

Slept in excessively, but still went to the protest. The newspaper was saying 10k people in San Jose, 7M nationwide. That’s like 2% of the entire country!

Also managed to run a couple of errands including haircut.

Watched (anime): Apothecary Diaries 1.13-15: Recap episode! New credits! (I liked the old OP better.) Back to the skulduggery, this time including fuel-air explosions to go with the poisonings.

Read (manga): Devil’s Candy vol 2 (Rem, Bikkuri): Still rereading what I originally read as webcomic. There is an ongoing plot now, but it’s still extremely ridiculous. Not as fluffy as TFOS, but still that energy. More characters are getting spotlight, but Pandora is still great. Ricket is also great.

Written (catgirl): I finally deleted the stuff I commented out, and also added a little more, so technically today was 1445, but that number feels extremely bogus.

Learning is good!

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage: Redemption 3.3-4: The cryonics one and the pool one. I like that they’re showing everyone has been cross-training all these years. Also, Parker is apparently all-in on the transhumanism, so I have my next Eclipse Phase character. (Yeah, like I could play that.)

Read (manga): Chainsaw Man vol 14-16 (Tatsuki Fujimoto): Denji is becoming more of a major character, but the other main character for this arc is just as hopeless at humaning as he is, so of course they have to go on a date and also get attacked by devils a lot. Really creepy horrible devils that show why 35% of all deaths in Japan are due to devil activity.

Written (catgirl): 117, and even that took staying up until forever o’clock. I’m not good at this writing thing, am I?

AKA Feral Cat Day, so good day to donate to rescue orgs.

No office today, since I went on Monday. No TV, Marith isn’t up to it. No brain for me. Only a new mindless pad game.

Read (manga): Devil’s Candy vol 1 (Rem, Bikkuri): I originally read this as a webcomic. Despite being secondary-world fantasy where everybody is monsters, it has very strong TFOS energy from all the wacky high-school high-jinks of goofy students.

Read (novel): The Empress of Forever (Max Gladstone): Kaiju Academy have to have their past life memories be those of the protagonist of a story Jeremy could in theory read or watch, so I picked Vivian Liao from  Gladstone’s transhuman-SF retelling of The Journey to the West. Not only is she super-gay, she arguably saved the galaxy, and one of those two is what the GM asked for. I don’t remember the last part where it gets very mystic and Buddhist, and also it’s weird, so maybe the end of the past-life memories should be right at the first encounter with the Empress. Anyway, every book needs the Monkey King as a terrifying cyborg pirate queen.

Written (catgirl): 115.

Also National Fossil Day and Hagfish Day, so Underappreciated Things in general.

Went to the office, ate meat and vegetables and rice, had a half-yearly review with my boss² who is in town this week and my boss³. Apparently I was supposed to come up with more to say on the mandatory self-criticism form, but they didn’t fire me, so whatever. I know I should care more, but it’s 2025.

I think my character for Kaiju Academy is going to have mushroom (well, fungus) magic to go with her dungeon magic. How can you go wrong with mushroom summoning?

Read (manga): Chainsaw Man vol 13 (Tatsuki Fujimoto): Our new MC almost made a friend, but then there was a devil contract and some more mass murder. Also Denji is completely failing at getting chicks.

Written (catgirl): 188.

i’m not great at lowercase, but when i take notes and stuff i often don’t bother with the shift key.

no gaming, ken is unavailable in some fashion. probably audit-related.

read (manga): chainsaw man vol 12 (tatsuki fujimoto): starting a new plotline, with a new main character. denji is a secondary character, and exerts his dim influence on the world, but lots of other people get mixed up with devils and get powers and have everybody they know murdered and so forth. actually, denji may have gotten the best deal of any we’ve seen so far.

written (catgirl): 171.

Got it covered.

Despite this being Monday the 13th, the most cursed day, the surprise meeting was not that bad. Yes, Boss³ M thinks we suck, but he’s not firing all of us or even putting us in solitary for not understanding Boss T’s explanation of the plan. In fact, the plan sounds a lot like what we were doing before upper management started changing middle management all the time. Fancy that.

Ate Indian food with sufficient naan, did a work, almost drowned trying to cross the street on my way home. Why is drainage such a foreign concept to North California?

Read (manga): Alice & Zoroku vol 1 (Tetsuya Imai): A semi-feral young girl with vast psionic(?) conjuration powers escapes the lab and is adopted by a lawful good old guy and his granddaughter. Other psionics pursue, etc.

Written (catgirl): 243.

We celebrated by announcing that we could possibly be induced to give people copies of PDFs if we thought they should have them.

After cancelling gaming a couple of times, we finally reconvened. Chrisber is here, so we still have a table of five and don’t need to feel bad about failing to find new gamers. Well, not more than usual, anyway.

Jeremy explained his vision for how magic works and our characters have memories of past lives and there was much discussion but only Dave and Chrisber started writing up characters on the spot (conduit magic and fiber magic respectively, many Best Jeanist references were made which only Dave and I got; this is why we need more players). Do I even remember how to write up a Hero character?

Read (manga): Sanda vol 1 (Paru Itagaki): In the 2080s, due to the horrible state of the world and dearth of children, Christmas has been forgotten. The power of Santa is only sleeping, though, and a schoolgirl uses mysterious knowledge to awaken it in her classmate, so he can use his Santa powers to help find her missing friend. Said powers mostly seem to consist of turning into a huge old dude, but more powers are developing. By the same person as Drip Drip, which was also very weird, so likely to get even more cracktastic.

Written (catgirl): 178.

Specifically, it’s Marith’s party!

We celebrated with the traditional bowling, although there were only four of us because everyone else was sick or busy or introverted. I was not the absolute worst at bowling, at least! Then we went back to Monkeycat Towers to see Ayse and Jus and Non, and eat DoorDashed Cheesecake Factory and choco mousse cake. Jus was on her way to HoCo (that’s how they say Homecoming this year) and looked very nice. All that took so long that Marith had to go home because tomorrow is work, so although it was happy, there was no anime.

Read (manga): Evil-ish (Kennedy Tarrell): Villains who are not necessarily evil in a modern/fantasy world, kind of like Nimona. Our nonbinary protagonist tries to join the organization of villains, because it’s way cooler than being a potion barista, and succeeds through an improbable series of events, along with the annoying person who has actual magical power. It’s not as great as they hoped, and they have to face the consequences of their actions and their friend’s past and ancient curses and everything.

Written (catgirl): 144.

 

Also National Family Bowling Day, which we will celebrate tomorrow, and Squid & Cuttlefish Day. (That’s like Frog & Toad, only with more tentacles.)

New Manager T tried to explain the brilliant plan she received from above, but we didn’t understand, so suddenly we have a mandatory in-office meeting on Monday with Newish Boss³ M. This is not filling me with optimism. How do resumes work again? (It’s 2025, they don’t work.)

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage: Redemption 3.1-2: The weekend in Paris, and the one with the crooked judge. I know they try to not do murders, but that house in France would have been an excellent site for an orbital bombardment, if only Hardison hadn’t wasted all of S2 failing to set up an orbital domination array.

Read (manga): FAIL.

Written (catgirl): 107.

We’re still at the level of lightly tweaking stuff we pick up off the ground, but I think that counts.

Went to the office, some people were there, ate rolled-up beef and onion and rice noodles and bean sprouts, did some work.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage: Redemption 2.12-13: Two-part season finale! You come at the Sophie, you best not miss!

Read (graphic novel): Teen Titans: Raven (Kami Garcia, Gabriel Picolo): Hey, if being half-demon was good enough for Merlin…!He probably didn’t have to deal with high-school crushes, though.

Written (catgirl): 298. I am rewriting a bunch, but if I actually delete the old words, instead of commenting them out, then my word count will be inflated in a way that feels bogus, even though I determined when I wrote the counting script that deleting is just as important as adding.

Or something like that.

Went to the office, Coworker D is still out so I had the room to myself, spent a million hours helping a customer on a call, ate some freekeh (roasted green wheat?) and falafel and other Mediterranean yummies.

Read (manga): Bungo Stray Dogs vol 1 (Kafka Asagiri, Sango Harukawa): Didn’t seem significantly different than the first bit of the anime.

Written (catgirl): 256.

Nope, haven’t got any of that either.

A bunch of stuff piled on as soon as I logged in to work, but the cats survived having their breakfast delayed by half an hour. Maybe I did too.

Played (Changeling the Lost): Berkeley 94. Longfingers has her first nightclub experience at a goth club in the city, and does not actually get eaten by a shitty boy vampire, because she is with a much better vampire and also assorted changelings. Of course none of the rest of the group know this, because Longfingers is usually hidden in the walls at night. At some time near then, Siddy and Theophania sneak into the Berkeley library again to read up on Fisher King stories to see what might happen if they do something to help Mark. Should they help Mark? Is he a good person? Does that even matter, given that he’s been hanging on to power for decades? Is there a part in the Fisher King stories that Jack is obviously playing? There is much discussion, and few conclusions.

Read (manga): Love Me for Who I Am vol 1 (Kata Konayama): An enby gets recruited to a maid cafe that is otherwise cross-dressing boys with the promise that there are people like them there, but they are actually various other flavors of queer rather than nonbinary, and there is drama. Also potential romance and complications.

Written (catgirl): 161.

Hopefully to eat the faces off book-banners.

Did some work, whatever.

After work, Marith lured me to play Redactle,which I am quite bad at, even when Sage is not helping. To be fair, though, the one I tried on my own had an answer of “Zhu Xi”, which I was not ever going to guess. It seems like cheating to start searching Wikipedia as soon as you have a largish chunk of words that seem distinct, even if that’s the intended way of succeeding.

Read (manga): Poison Ivy: Thorns (Kody Keplinger, Sara Kipin): High-school Pamela Isley learns that men suck, plants are great, girls are great, and murder is extremely satisfying and rich in soil nutrients.

Written (catgirl): 147.

 

Another global holiday hated by the US government.

Did almost nothing today. Did try the new Burmese restaurant at the end of the street, but their salt and pepper tofu is too much fried, not enough salt or pepper. I will try the chicken pumpkin stew and coconut rice tomorrow.

Read (light novel): Sound! Euphonium (Ayano Takeda): I remember all these beats from the anime, so I guess it must have been a pretty close adaptation. The main character is a lot gayer in the novel, though, or at least she notices how pretty girls are a lot.

Written (catgirl): 204.

Not sure how to explain that Cephalopod Awareness Day and World Animal Day are the same day, otherwise.

Got up not horribly late (only very late), did some shopping. It was not as good as usual because not only do I have no Katalepsis to read, the sandwich shop’s microwave was broken so I had to change my order, and the bookstore is pupating for its transformation into a Barnes & Noble.

Watched (anime): Apothecary Diaries 1.10-12: Intrigue! Murder! Medical issues! Mass layoffs! Welp, back to the brothel. Surely Jinshi won’t miss her.

Read (manga): I Belong to the Baddest Girl at School vol 1 (Ui Kashima): The delinquent girl thinks she asked the hapless boy out, the bullied boy thinks the terrifying girl has impressed him into servitude. One of her minions knows what’s going on but is too amused to straighten them out; the other is different but equally confused. Those are pretty much the only characters with lines.

Written (catgirl): 236.

I saw one butterfly the other day. That’s not really the right number to see. I think I’ve seen more hummingbirds, which is kind of alarming given their relative sizes.

Did some work, sat on a call with a customer forever but did fix their problem as much as it probably could be, forgot to eat lunch. Should probably die in a pit.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage: Redemption 2.10-11: The one about the grad student and the evil professor, and the one where the main characters are only in the background. Also, Parker is literally Batman.

Read (manga): Beauty and the Beast of Paradise Lost vol 1 (Kaori Yuki): Beauty is weird-looking and bullied, has a horrible home life, eventually winds up in the time and space castle of the Beast, hunted by the local authorities, everything is terrible and kind of cracktastic.

Written (catgirl): 153.

Does anyone observe this?

Still no office, WFH all this week, yay.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage: Redemption 2.8-9: Harry’s turn in the mastermind chair, and the MLM one.

Read (novel): Broker vol 1 (Derelict Presence): The main character gets popups, but mostly it’s not LitRPG, although it does have sudden powers, world eaten by monsters, etc. MC manages to come back in time from supervillains ownzoring everything, with the meta-power of being able to shuffle powers around, as well as being able to make binding contracts and unable to lie. Now she has only a few short years to keep the world from imploding, and no time for moral qualms.

Read (manga): Kase-san and… vol 2-3 (Hiromi Takashima): This is Kase-san and Bento and Kase-san and Shortcake. More high-school romance. Yamada is too pure for this world, or at least for knowing what to do with a girl and a bed, or being able to take a bath with her crush on the school trip.

Written (catgirl): 218.