Month: October 2026

Does cheese count? Because I showed my affection for cheese.

GMed (D&D5E): Sign of the Cygnets. Into the cave of the death scallop and the haunted crabs and the Kit Memorial Romance Manuscript. Also the troglodyte witch, who wasn’t weird enough, and a magic item which will take considerable ingenuity to use for evil. Next time, they have to try to get their ancestress’s stuff from the family that bought the house. It was lame, but I remembered to have elevation differences on the battlemap, so people seemed to have fun.

Written (Sign of the Cygnets): 211 toward next session, some of it possibly even useful.

Ken kindly used me to dispose of some excess chili. It was good.

Watched (anime): The Apothecary Diaries 3.4: It’s really not clear how Maomao is going to stop this problem, or how her family is ever going to get her hitched with Jinshi.

Watched (anime): Daemons of the Shadow Realm 1.22: An interstitial episode, cleaning up after the last set of fights and introducing the next set.

Read (short): “After the Coup” (John Scalzi): Reread, diplomacy through naked exhibition combat and exploitation of alien anatomy.

Written (Sign of the Cygnets): I guess I’m ready for tomorrow. Ish.

Happy Happy Ayse Day!!

Played (Lancer): Last Stop. Further into the mysterious ship, which is not just tossed on the tides of time, but undergoing active temporal flux. We had a fight, which we kept from becoming a worse fight by unprinting the opposing mech as it was being printed, and then none of it happened except it kind of did. Surely that’s fine.

Read (manga): Breasts Are My Favorite Things In The World! vol 5-8 (Wakame Konbu): Yep, they actually caught feelings! Also they figured out that giving breasts attention can be sexy. The end!

Written (Sign of the Cygnets): …some.

Naturally, some reptiles will find them more interesting than others. But isn’t that how we got Genesis?

Read (short story collection): Tales from the Territory (Travis Baldree): The first appearance of Zyll, and several other stories around and about the “Legends and Lattes” books, like the backstories of Tandri and Thimble, and some extremely egregious trademark infringement.

Read (manga): Breasts Are My Favorite Things In The World! vol 4 (Wakame Konbu): The one girl has realized she might not like the other girl for having great breasts, but likes the breasts because they’re hers. She’s still a weird perv, though.

Written (Sign of the Cygnets): 168. Should have spent more time writing history and less looking through the Monster Manual.

Early meeting was cancelled at the last minute again. Sheesh.

Read (comic strip collection): ZomCom’ics (Emi Mena Garrucho): Wordless comic strips about a zombie girl, her vampire friend, and her werewolf boyfriend(?) in a world of silly monsters. Was originally on Webtoons, I think.

Written (Sign of the Cygnets): 149. But am I concentrating on the wrong thing? Sure, there’s a very small dungeon, but then there’s more investigation that I need to be ready for.

We could have them, if we wanted to have nice things instead of billionaires.

Did a work, did a laundry, did not do an extra laundry. Tomorrow, when the cats are less in the way (it could happen!). Went for a tiny walk for my tiny mental and physical health, bought some drinks to keep the health from getting out of hand.

Read (manga): Breasts Are My Favorite Things In The World! vol 3 (Wakame Konbu): Another pair of highly questionable high-schoolers get involved, as well as an onlooker. The main couple are considering what they mean to each other, though. Not sure why this seems so degenerate when it was fine for a YA novel to start off at second base. Probably the art.

Written (Sign of the Cygnets): 236. Monsters monsters monster monsters.

Accidentally scrolled after clicking through to an Instagram link, although in fact Instagram showed today that no one except Nazis should use it, and ended up going shopping an hour later than I meant to.

Watched (anime): The Apothecary Diaries 3.3: Ugh, humans. At least Maomao can experiment on them, I guess.

Watched (anime): Daemons of the Shadow Realm 1.20-21: There’s just a whole underworld of criminal daemon wielders, not even related to Kagemoris and the village. Also, more backstory and apology for Asa and Yuru’s childhood.

Read (manga): Flying Witch vol 14 (Chihiro Ishizuka): Dungeon-crawling, and also Elemental Magic Sumo. Even though magic was allowed, I think Akane cheated, but maybe if she can do things like that, they were scared to object. Also, apple donuts!

Written (Geometry for Mutants): 227, and also some D&D.

Or for most of us, imagine what it might smell like.

Watched (animated): Knights of Guinevere 1.1-2: Had to rewatch the first episode because we didn’t remember what was happening. Boy, that’s a lot of doom! And shadiness and murders and robots and more murders! Not sure how the executive assistant AI gets away with being that sassy.

Read (novel): The Violent Stones (Dreamer’s Riot): Our MC and her OP GF finish crushing the evil oligarchs who have been rearranging reality to suit their own childhood traumas and put the world back in a hopefully-more-fair order. The end!

Written (Geometry for Mutants): 461, but most of that was finally deleting stuff I commented out long ago, now that the story is definitely not going that way. I wish I knew which way it was actually going…

I meant to go to the office today, but it didn’t work. If I needed a socially-acceptable explanation, I’d say I was lethargic from the vaccination on Monday, but that would not actually be true.

Read (light novel): To Another World.. With Land Mines! vol 1 (Itsuki Mizuho, Nekobyou Neko): Slow-moving isekai about the practicalities of living in a fantasy world while avoiding any of the metaphorical land mines like powers that strip years off your life with every use.

Read (manga): The Death Defying Princess Creates a Yuri Harem to Survive vol 1 (Aoi Akashiro, Moromi Kouji, Shinya Murata, Nobuhiko Yanai): Every time the debaucherous princess annoys people so much she gets decapitated, she time-loops back a year and has to get the woman she wronged to not hate her. The princess thinks she’s straight, but she has only one way to get people to like her…

Read (short): “Alien Animal Encounters” (John Scalzi): Pretty much what it says on the tin, from the beginning of Scalzi’s “aliens x normal life” streak.

Read (manga): The Apothecary Diaries vol 15 (Natsu Hyuuga, Nekokurage, Itsuki Nanao, Touco Shino): Still in the latter half of S2 of the anime, so not much that’s new to me. There’s some foreshadowing for S3 that I hadn’t noticed in the anime, though.

Written (Geometry for Mutants): 127, and also I had to reinstall some software because I upgraded my OS yesterday. Even people who aren’t authors have some amount of admin work to do, I guess.

Got up early for early meeting, but it was cancelled on five minutes’ notice, so then I was already up. Bah.

Read (manga): Spy x Family vol 16 (Tatsuya Endo): Some Anya high jinx, some depressing war and politics, some Thorn Princess Murder Time. No matter which you read SxF for, there’s something for you! Unless you like the curly-haired minion guy, I guess. Nothing about him, or the other Twilight subordinates.

Written (Geometry for Mutants): 215.

GMed (D&D5E): Sign of the Cygnets: It wasn’t as terrible as I feared (which isn’t the same as not being terrible), but the PCs are headed in the direction of clues to their rightful kingdom. They adopted the enemies I sent to annoy them, which surely will not go wrong at all. Next session: murdered in a cave!

Read (novel): Witchlings (Claribel A Ortega): When it’s time for the 12-year-old witches to get sorted into their color-coded covens, the main character gets assigned as Menial Underclass along with the girl who bullies her and the new girl. They decide to risk being turned into toads instead by agreeing to hunt a terrifying monster, and immediately get tangled up in the conspiracies of the morbidly wealthy. Start middle-grade readers on class warfare! The setting is a magical equivalent of roughly modern-day, which is often done badly, but at least the celebrity crushes and rude language sounded right.

Written: Gotta prep for next session, it’s only two weeks!

Happy happy Lizardday!

Did the usual sleeping and shopping and dying in a pit, prepared more for D&D.

Watched (anime): The Apothecary Diaries 3.2: After two whole seasons, Maomao no longer recoils in horror when Jinshi touches her. Truly a romance for the ages!

Watched (anime): Daemons of the Shadow Realm 1.18-19: More daemon fights, people running around all over, Asa being terrifying, Ivan being terrible. I guess really it’s all the same fight, just spread out over the whole warehouse yard.

Written: I know my players are going to immediately head for something I haven’t prepared, but I don’t know what to prepare except everything, so this will have to be good enough.

Played (Lancer): Last Stop. A ship gets tossed at us by the tides of space, and it’s full of extremely creepy shit labeled in cuneiform. The creepiness is more active the further we go, and we end on a cliffhanger right as we find the creepiness that will try to actively kill us. Good times in the middle of nowhere!

Read (novel): The Broken Dead (Dreamer’s Riot): Fourth book of “Otherworldly Anarchist”, MC and her revolutionaries make it to the hinted-at other realm and find out some of what’s going on there (it’s terrible and needs to be murdered), and she finds out the horrible truth that was revealed to the reader last volume. Many murders, many nonlethal fights, backstory of the MC before she was reincarnated.

Written: Did more prep for D&D. This is going to be terrible.

Surprisingly, I did not have an early meeting this morning, and was also kind of functional for work.

Watched (movie): Coyote vs. Acme: It was pretty good! Amazon charged as much as it would cost both of us to see it in the theater, because they suck, but we meant to see it in the theater and failed, so whatever. It was very nostalgic, so I’m not sure what The Youngs would think of it, but it had good Coyote and good human characters and Rube Goldberg devices and all the cameos.

Written: 177 words of D&D prep.

Did not have a badger of any shape to send through the Internet, so had to get up for the early meeting.

Read (gaming miscellany): Encyclopedia Moetica vol 1 (Moe Lane): Many strange objects/places/phenomena suitable for a modern conspiracy/tabloid game with all of magic, aliens, interdimensional incidents, men in black, etc. Many of them were pretty entertaining.

Read (novel): Death Has Gone Rogue (Rachel Aaron, Travis Bach): Sequel to Death Has Joined the Party, our increasingly-less-hapless quasilich and his bizarre assortment of companions continue trying to save the world from the horrors at the bottom of the live-stream dungeon. Things get really over the top in this volume, but now we know more about what’s going on and why the hero is in the predicament he is in.

Written (Geometry for Mutants): 115.

I did very little today. Apparently I need to be ready to run D&D next week, though. I’m sure it will be terrible.

Read (novel): Suffer No Kings (Dreamer’s Riot): More murders, betrayals, plans, regicides, excessive use of magic, some revelation about what is going on with Sara’s magic, and doubts about the reality of reality.

Written (Geometry for Mutants): 249.

Also, check your voter reg!

Hurray, the grocery store had the tea I like again!

Watched (anime): The Apothecary Diaries 3.1: Maomao is still outside the palace, but we know she’s going to get dragged back in to Jinshi’s problems and/or arms. Also, although I knew that locusts were edible, I didn’t know grasshoppers were only technically edible (IE, gross).

Watched (anime): Daemons of the Shadow Realm 1.16-17: Schemes and traps all around, but Yuru goes too hard to be taken out like that. Probably.

Written (Geometry for Mutants): 177.

I don’t have a car to feed, but I did work anyway.

Watched (live-action TV): Spider-Noir 1.8: The End! That was actually fewer deaths than I was expecting, although most of them were deserved to one degree or another. I’m sure cancelling the show at this point was an extremely fiscal decision, but really, fuck those guys.

Read (short): “The Last Adult Superstore” (John Wiswell): I didn’t even clock the normal meaning of the term initially, so I was perhaps less surprised by the twist. Also, it’s tumblr’s fault.

Written (Geometry for Mutants): 395. Apparently I knew what I wanted to write.

Instead of watching TV, Marith and I went to the mall where Jus volunteers at the cat cafe to have dinner with her family at the traditional greasy buffet, and then back to Monkeycat Towers for cake and presents and dragons and happiness. We got lost a lot, but will not discuss that further. Jus’s presents were mostly creepy dolls, which seems on-brand, but she also got an excellent dragon.

Read (novel): Keepers of the Flesh (Glynn Stewart): Sequel to Seekers in the Void, our questionably heroic officer of the interstellar monopoly has to deal with a more human-derived problem this time, or rather several of them, since there are about three separate arcs in one book. Also, various crimes against humanity and nature.

Written (anything): FAIL. I spent my evening being social and/or lost instead.