I, myself, drank one or more beverages today!
Also I did a work or something. Whatever.
Watched: The Ancient Magus’ Bride 2.10-12: So many sketchy people (and things) acting sus! Okay, I guess attempted murder isn’t exactly sus, they were very clear on that.
Read: The Ancient Magus’ Bride vol 4 (Kore Yamazaki): Yay, more dragons!
Written: 161. Second drafts are the worst.
Does maniacal cackling count? It better!
Today I did one (1) errand, and also played some Minecraft. I got enough diamonds to make a pickaxe, and I already have a Lavanator, so I can make a nether portal whenever I like. Also I have a chicken run, so I can get eggs and feathers.
Read: The Ancient Magus’ Bride vol 3 (Kore Yamazaki): Yay, Ruth! Boo, Cartaphilus!
Written: 183.
Did the usual shopping things, played some Minecraft without destroying anybody’s house, visited friends.
Watched: Sacrificial Princess & the King of Beasts 14-16: A new enemy! Besides racism, that is.
Written: 342.
Yes, even student journalists who oppose genocide.
Got handed a case right at the end of the day so I had to work right up to the end, bah.
Played: Zoomwarts. Rosamund tried to do science, Bella got detention, Rosamund found a secret door that was there in her dream, Bella crawled into a hole by herself and went silent.
Read: The Dragon’s Soulmate is a Mushroom Princess! vol 2 (Hanami Nishine, poporucha): Romance therapy is going slowly, but the romance is progressing despite the female lead’s terrifyingly sheltered upbringing.
Read: I’d Rather Have a Cat Than a Harem! vol 2 (Kosuzu Kobato, Hinano Chano): Having befriended almost everyone who appeared in the game, including the probable heroine, the MC goes on to live a happy life with her loving prince and a zillion animals, the end!
Read: Tacticians of Ahm Early Access 0.8.3 (Christian Sorrell): I guess it’s Final Fantasy Tactics the RPG, but (unbeknownst to the characters) set in a digital world that is slowly degrading, introducing corrupt10n. All square grid all the time, most powers have an area of effect in grid squares (often one specific grid square), plentiful multiclassing, etc.
Written: 167.
And yet, my cats still don’t seem to like seafood. Which is legit, it’s not like their ancestors were out there hunting tuna! I guess a bobcat could hunt salmon or trout? Probably not as effectively as rabbits, though.
Went to the office, ate a kind of cold and soggy Reuben, did a work.
Read: The Ancient Magus’ Bride vol 2 (Kore Yamazaki): Still zipping right along with Chise and her lack of survival instincts in the deep end.
Written: 140.
AKA Labor Day everywhere that’s not a blighted capitalist hellscape (and some places that are, I guess).
I’m the only one who goes into the office on Wednesdays, so I went in even though we had an early-morning meeting. I had to commute on the bus since the train doesn’t run very frequently outside of rush hour, but it wasn’t too much slower. Ate a Korean bento thing, did a work.
Read: Ogami-San Can’t Keep It In vol 4 (Yu Yoshidamaru): Oh no, it’s the hot childhood friend! Who is also immune to the male lead’s quirk, to add insult to insult.
Read: The Ancient Magus’ Bride vol 1 (Kore Yamazaki): Rereading from the very beginning because I didn’t remember much of it, but I do remember it now that I’m reading it, and also how fast it moved at the beginning. Halfway through the first volume and they’re already in Ulthar!
Written: 132.
What’s up, Doc?
No more early morning meetings on Tuesday, is what?
Played: Nothing, we failed at organization.
Written: 243. Remember when my quota was 250 and I could make it?
A most excellent invention!
Watched: The Ancient Magus’ Bride 2.7-9: Field trip! As usual, Chise cannot go anywhere without attracting monsters, but she’s a lot more able to deal with them now.
Read: Witch of Thistle Castle vol 2 (John Tarachine): Huh, maybe the male lead isn’t gay after all.
Written: 134.
So I should be writing!
Played: Librarians Errant. It turns out Gladys’s minions have wangled the Water Baron’s permission to be there under cover of being itinerant book shelvers or something, so the team has to offer to help them and try to find The Magical Education first. Which they do, but they stick around for a while to make sure all the books are correctly tagged in LoC, not Dewey Decimal and also to throw off suspicion. Alas, the Alexandrians figure it out, and as the team is taking in the Troll Experience before leaving town, the Dewey Decimal Trio busts in with a bunch more hobgoblins. Circus fight! Fortunately the trolls are not best pleased by this, and help fend off the invaders while Shia slips away with the book. Once it’s clear the book is no longer present, the fight is abandoned in favor of beer.
Written: 115.
My plush baby tapir probably needs a better name than “Baby Tapey”, don’t they?
I did the usual shopping things, got unjustifiably mad at Marith for destroying one of the campfires I set up under beehives when I find them, then got Jus’s house blown up because approximately one million creepers attacked while I was stopping by on my way to give Dave dripstone points for a lava factory. Apparently I should just hide in my own valley and never leave.
Played: Minecraft, very very badly.
Watched: Sacrificial Princess and the King of Beasts 12-13: Poor cat princess! She needs to grow up to overthrow the patriarchy! I am very disappointed that the hyena-soldier is a boy, too.
Played: Kick a ball very ineptly down the street so kids can get energy out.
Written: 124. Can’t blame capitalism this time.
Can the aliens come save us from the idea of IP?
Played: Zoomwarts. Food fight!
Read: Sandy Pug After Dark (Various): Varied spec-fic smut: aliens, AIs, monsters, gods, queer people. Needed more editing.
Read: The Exodus Gambit (Glynn Stewart): The start of a new missiles-in-space series, a sort-of princess on the run from the traitorous uncle who murdered the rest of their family, and her bodyguard, trying to outwit their pursuers who have a ship that’s much better in every way and get to help.
Written: 113.
I approve of both, although I have not seen a lot of crossovers.
Went to the office, ate a beef curry with green papaya, did a work.
Read: #DRCL: Midnight Children vol 2 (Shin’ichi Sakamoto): More hauntings, ghastly apparitions, madness, and a pretty extra Van Helsing.
Read: Witch of Thistle Castle vol 1 (John Tarachine): This is the same genre as Ancient Magus’ Bride, but the OP teenager is a boy sent to live with a London witch. Also he seems kind of gay for the cute French boy.
Read: Lieutenant Fusilier in the Farthest Reaches (Erika Chappell): It’s the British Army in the days of buying commissions, except it’s in space and all the troops are robots. Our dashing lesbian lieutenant is one of the extremely few robots to purchase an officer’s commission. Colonialism and class divides are explicitly addressed, although maybe not resolved in ways that are satisfying to modern sensabilities. Also, gay robot lady!
Written: 234. I think.
No thank you.
Went to the office, ate a salmon poke bowl, did a work.
Read: Daemons of the Shadow Realm vol 4 (Hiromu Arakawa): Yep, everybody is conspiring. Also, some daemons are just plain mean.
Read: Please Don’t Tell My Parents I Saved the World Again (Richard Roberts): Ninth in the series, back to the bi poly high-school necromancer. She makes a new friend who, unfortunately, comes with a lot of baggage (but does not want to join her harem).
Read: Komi Can’t Communicate vol 29 (Tomohito Oda): It is simultaneously the beach episode, hot springs episode, and stupid-games-for-high-stakes-because-idiots-are-in-charge episode. But Komi can actually communicate, at least well enough to defend her boyfriend!
Written: 187 but also some journal.
Also something involving copyright, which should be abolished in favor of UBI.
No gaming, Ken had more classes on UK time or whatever.
Read: I’d Rather Have a Cat Than a Harem! vol 1 (Kosuzu Kobato, Hinano Chano): Reincarnated as an otome game villainess, but the fluffy version. Her whole family is also reincarnated as her new family, she can easily avoid romantic entanglements by eating enough to no longer conform to local beauty standards, she makes friends with the lady who invented the cat rescue in that world, all is well until it turns out at least some of the hot boys are actually nice and also like animals, and is that the heroine?
Written: 290.
It’s a nice planet, innit? Be a shame if something happened– oh. Uh, never mind.
Played: Nothing, Zoomwarts has to be on Fridays now so that Jus doesn’t die. But I did do a little Minecraft before trying to be useful for the evening. Mostly it was rain and zmobies, and logging.
Written: 202. Was that useful?
Another one I’m falling down on.
Today I ran three (3) errands and got one (1) compliment on my “I’m with the banned” shirt.
Written: 239. Also did a little catching up on this journal.
I keep thinking I could try edibles, just for the experience, but have never managed to actually do such a thing. It would probably make my face fall off or something.
What I did do today was go to the very last Spring Fling for Nonny and draw lines on many elementary-school children. Some of the people who were supposed to show up to help Ayse check off kids as they completed laps didn’t show, so I had to help. It was fine, the kids were hardly even traumatized by my appearance, but standing in the same facing for a couple of hours during the middle of the day got me a sunburn on the tops of my calves.
Played: Minecraft. We had another session during which I was super-lame but got to listen to people being super-cool on voice chat, so that was fine. I found a bunch of beehives and managed to both smoke them and not irritate them, so I ended up with a bunch of honeycomb and honey bottles, which I will later use for something clever. Candles, probably. I also found the big pool of surface lava I had seen earlier, which was further inland than I thought. I think it’s actually close to Jus’s homestead.
Written: 164. This isn’t going in the way it should if I want it to sync up with everything else, but I think I know how to fix it.
Hey! That’s me!
Read: The Dragon’s Soulmate is a Mushroom Princess! vol 1 (Hanami Nishine, poporucha): Light novel, the main character has been so emotionally abused by the fiance who just dumped her that she doesn’t believe anyone can love her, the prince who keeps trying to spend time with her must be insane to appreciate her objectively disgusting power to sprout mushrooms on things, etc. Fortunately this is a light novel, so romance therapy >> antidepressants (which haven’t been invented). Also there are interludes from the PoV of the summoned mushrooms.
Written: 259, but I don’t like how this scene is going in this new draft. Maybe my refusal to engage in second drafts all these years has been well-founded! Or maybe I’m just, you know, a bad writer.
I hope everyone is aware of all nearby velociraptors at all times!
Went to the office again, sat on the phone with a customer, ate a falafel and a hummus.
Read: #DRCL vol 1 (Shin’ichi Sakamoto): Despite the hashtag octothorpe in the title, it is set in Victorian England and the height of technology so far is the typewriter. It is an extremely cracktastic, possibly even hallucinatory, boarding-school AU of Dracula with alternate personalities, crazy foreigners, excessive interpersonal drama, the first girl at the boy’s school, inexplicable supernatural weirdness, and general bizarre creepiness.
Read: The Remarkable Journey of Coyote Sunrise (Dan Gemeinhart): A twelve-year-old girl and her dad travel the country ina converted schoolbus after the rest of their family has died, never talking about the past or going back to their old hometown, until Coyote hears of something she has to get home for on a tight deadline, and hatches a Cunning Plan. Emotional roadtrip hijinks ensue.
Written: 213.
I don’t recall interacting with the librarians much, but the one at my first high school would let us hang out in the library and invent space wargames during pep rallies.
Yay bats! Bats are great!
Went to the office, ate Mayan-Chinese fusion cuisine (Pollo Pibil Bao) and felt very futuristic.
Read: Monthly in the Garden With My Landlord vol 1-2 (Yodokawa): A manga editor breaks up with her girlfriend, looks for a new place to live, finds a house that is suspiciously cheap and turns out to come with an eccentric yet beautiful live-in landlady, lesbian hijinks ensue. The landlady’s colorful past is a big deal.
Read: Magilumiere Magical Girls Inc vol 1 (Sekka Iwata, Yu Aoki): Monsters randomly appear in future Tokyo, transforming technomagical heroines to exorcise them are big business, a college grad with no talents except pluck and speed-reading and eidetic memory falls in with a magical girl startup company populated entirely by weirdos, life-threatening hijinks ensue.
Written: 119.
Another one I’m in favor of!
Exciting news at work, possibly good, more likely neutral, definitely unexpected.
Played: Lancer. The horrible plan that could not be avoided is put into action, and goes okay, although not well enough to avoid the set-piece battles, and we are far too late to save the future of the colony. Finally, we reach the scene of the crime and gaze upon extremely distressing sights. Next session, the Final Boss!
Written: 123. We haven’t gotten to The Mushroom yet, but the MC finally made the terrible decision. Next: the consequences!
Apparently I’m in favor.
Played: Zoomwarts. I am still the worst GM ever, so uh let’s hear it for consistency? I need to make Jus tell me what kind of terribleness should be in store for Bella.
Written: 183.
As long as you don’t try to measure it too precisely, anyway.
Played: Librarians Errant. The field trip continues, but while checking out a famous bridge for Grumman’s research paper, the team is accosted by talking goats and “rescued” by a dashing troll vigilante. All is revealed when Thaïs is knocked off the bridge but rescued by troll stagehands (and kissed by a troll, about which the less thought, the better) working for the troupe of troll actors who have been hired to play a prank on someone crossing the bridge that day, who is not the team. Everything is straightened out, but Thaïs will forever use this as an example of the terrible things that happen when you get up too early in the morning. After some additional travel, they arrive in Yartar, make contact with the Water Baron who is only too happy to show them her library, and help the Popesses of the Church of the Crystal Dragon (from the previous campaign) with their recurring Bane problem. Walking into a trap is a perfectly good way of dealing with it, right? (Thaïs used Flirt. It wasn’t very effective. But she did get a minor magic item of the goddess of Death and Rebirth, which is entirely fitting for her background.)
Written: 187.
Plants are good! They make oxygen and food and paper!
Played: Minecraft. After not playing since last Saturday, I am way behind everybody else, but whatever. I still like trundling around mining things and crafting things and seeing things. I found ice, but have no Silk Touch equipment to collect it, and found powder snow to experience the fun of hypothermia. Still not sure where that surface lava is.
Watched: Nothing. Marith wasn’t up for going places, so we all stayed home and played Minecraft more.
Written: 195.
Humans have flying into space, however clumsily, for about sixty years. I wonder what it will look like after another sixty? (“Spaceflight? Oh, yeah, we used to do that before World of Warcraft XXXVII came out.”)
Used a fact about shark eyes in the meeting today, but I’m running low on facts.
Read: D&D5e Monsters of the Multiverse (Jeremy Crawford, et al): I usually like monster books, but maybe corporate D&D books don’t count. It wasn’t bad, but most of the monsters were familiar from previous editions (gnoll flind, Zuggtmoy, etc) and 5e writeups are kind of boring because they have to be very mechanical for the proper videogame feel. I do like that the new PC race writeups don’t have stat modifiers, only size/move/darkvision/special powers. Now you can play any class as any of these races without hamstringing yourself.
Written: 252. Main Character, why are you not making the terrible decision? Do I need to put the flashback off until later?
Now Sage is also one year old! She is extremely bb for such a grownup cat.
Went back to the office, ate eggplant stir-fry, did a work. First day this year I have not felt the need for a jacket.
Read: Sheeply Horned Witch Romi vol 2 (Yoichi Abe): The world is completely different again, fragments of the boy’s personality are looking for fragments of the witch’s personality to reassemble, but this may not be as straight-forward as hoped, and the results might not be entirely positive.
Read: Wartorn Stars (Glynn Stewart): Having reached the stars of the aliens who need help, the humans save as many days as they can, which is not all of them, but enough to get acclaim from the aliens and their allies, and also find out a lot of confusing things about the enemy.
Read: Dai Dark vol 2 (Q Hayashida): Finally the main character and his skeletal buddy have their own creepy spaceship so they can fly around looking for trouble meatball spaghetti and bones.
Written: 176.
You can do it, young writers! Don’t listen to the haters! Especially not if the hater is you!
Went to the office, ate a barbecue, did a work. Got an urgent customer call at the end of the day, but was able to make the customer happy by quitting time.
Read: Sheeply Horned Witch Romi vol 1 (Yoichi Abe): Rereading, because I tried to start vol 2 and had no idea what was going on. Depressed high-school girl gets the power to reshape the world into the metaphor of her psyche, the only person who isn’t in a coma is the boy she likes, at the end she’s entering a new instar or something. Right!
Read: Dai Dark vol 1 (Q Hayashida): There’s a teenaged kid in a wacky grim space setting full of disgustingly organic tech and necromancy, he has a skeletal life-support back, everyone is hunting him because they think his bones will grant any wish, ultra-violent space hijinks ensue.
Read: Raven’s Flag (Glynn Stewart): Number 6(?) in the series about trying to put together the remains of the alien empire that was just overthrown, starting a new arc where aliens from far across the old empire have come to ask humanity for help because they are getting their asses handed to them by mysterious attackers.
Written: 165.
I no longer use libraries that much, but will always defend and celebrate them, because libraries are awesome.
Boss B is back from vacation, so I had to get up early for 1:1, but all is well.
Played: Lancer. The PCs talked to the historical war crimes NHP in orbit and found out some about the other historical NHPs, but mostly spent a lot of time talking about what to do next and coming to the conclusion that they’ve only put off the thing they didn’t want to do, not found any way to avoid it.
Read: The Abandoned Heiress Gets Rich With Alchemy and Scores an Enemy General! vol 2 (Miyako Tsukuhara, Satsuki Sheena): Road trip to another kingdom that has dragons, but also has demon problems. Further tsundereness.
Written: 120. Meh.
Played: Zoomwarts?! How did that happen? I blame Jus and her spring break. Anyway, I wrote off the entire game so far as a dream, which gave the players the opportunity to fix everything wrong with the setting, but they did nothing except move it forward to second year so they could feel superior to the new first-years. Marith had a great idea that I will have to implement if we manage to play again, and also I guess I should find a summary of book four (since that’s the year they’re in) since they want things to be the same-ish.
Written: 141.
I did like four different errands today, including getting my cranial filaments shortened, so technically it was not a day of complete uselessness, and yet it still felt like one.
Written: 150. Apparently simple errands are all I can expect to accomplish.