Author: Trip the Space Parasite

Did Chicago write this?

Even though I didn’t go to the office yesterday, I had to get up early to see the new shade of yellow, so today my brain was very small. Smaller than usual, I mean.

Read: “Olga” (CT Adams): Youth and stolen artifacts are still no match for old age and cunning, especially in a wizard duel.

Read: “Sweetheart” (Abbey Mei Otis): In case you missed the memo, bigotry sucks, even when it’s against literal aliens.

Read: “Fare Thee Well” (Cathy Clamp): A summer internship at a morgue is unusual, but MC did not expect it to be that unusual.

Read: Deadly Weapon (Adira Slattery, Fen Slattery): A strange game about having a magic gun and there being demons that you could shoot, but the more bullets you’re holding on to, the greater your superpowers

Read: “Dislocation Space” (Garth Nix): I think I read this one before. A WWII Russian sniper with a circus contortionist background (would anybody buy that for an RPG character?) is sprung from the gulag to explore a very unusual tunnel.

Read: Descendant Machine (Gareth L Powell): I dunno, I feel like the entire civilization of post-human entities should have been able to figure that out without needing a random wild-type human who’d barely been thinking about the problem for a few million seconds. Also, C20 cultural references, although the humans were abducted from Earth in mid-C21 or so, so it’s not quite as bad as some.

Read: “The Trains That Climb the Winter Tree” (Michael Swanwick, Eileen Gunn): Faerie crimes and childhood and adulthood and memory. It reminded me a bit of Diana Wynne Jones.

Write: 192.

Also National Burrito Day. These should not be combined, unless you’re sharing your burrito with a rat friend.

Did not go to the office this, time, as we had an early all-hands to celebrate the fact that Marketing has changed all our colors and private equity owns a chunk of the company and somebody needed to cover while most people went in to make the office look busy.

Read: Starfire: A Red Peace (Spencer Ellsworth): It’s not actually Star Wars, but probably in the same subgenre. Vat-grown hybrids of the now-extinct psychic aliens rebel and overthrow the evil human empire, instituting their own genocidal regime, giant planet-eating spiders lurk on the frontier, a hapless smuggler and a renegade hybrid soldier stumble across a secret and must save everything while fleeing from the new empire, space battles at improbably low range and velocity with manual guns, etc.

Written: 225.

I count, at least according to my HR profile.

Went to the office, ate a deep-dish pizza, did a work.

Read: I Married My Female Friend vol 1 (Shio Usui): Marriage is something everybody should try, so two friends agree that if they aren’t otherwise attached by five years after college graduation, they’ll marry each other, and they do. One of them is obviously much more into this than the other, at least initially, but there is affection and cuteness.

Read: God Bless the Mistaken vol 1 (Nakatani Nio): In a world where the laws of nature are always making an exception (giant plants growing everywhere, then the plants disappear and people can walk on air, then people are earthbound and everything is mirror-reversed), a high-school boy runs errands for his landlady who studies the glitches. I have trouble believing a society so much like ours could happen in such a world, but it’s cute.

Written: 309. This is working better.

Are you sure about that?

Played: Lancer, although we had no Kelsey. The spiderbots that were placed on the mantelpiece in the last session were definitely used against us, and it hurt a lot, although we were chewy enough that the station scuttled some of itself to try to get rid of us.

Read: From the Red Fog vol 1 (Mosae Nohara): Unrepentant tween serial killers in Victorian England, with the occasional spot of rape. Do not want.

Written: 122 terrible words. I’m not just saying that, they actually aren’t working. I think I need to back up a bit and approach this scene from a different angle.

Joke’s on you, I’m a fool every day!

You can tell by the way I engage in capitalism.

Read: Beastrings (Shikaku Yamamoto): Japanese fantasy characters (witches, elves, beastfolk, bards) in a modernish city (skyscrapers, cell phones) doing stuff that eventually ties back to the huge disaster that destroyed the original fantasy city. The mayor is a D&D barbarian with a hands-on approach to resolving civic issues, there are various other superpowered characters with various personal motivations and whatnot.

Written: 337.

Played: Librarians Errant. The team, which is now 5th level but still has no cool team name, goes through the Elemental Plane of Books to get to their next stop on the hunt for The Magical Education, instead of walking on muddy roads in the rain and cold like normal people, which saves like 3 days but does get them jumped when they cut through the bad (Dewey decimal) part of the stacks. Fortunately the rabid bat-books and book-lizards (yes, absolutely, you are correct about what they are, no question) are not that much of a problem, and soon the team arrives at the Kryptgarden Branch Campus. Somehow Thaïs is beaten at cute girls by Lily, of all people. Also they meet an absolutely terrifying dragon, find a suspect who is actually a victim, and stop a foolish professor from sacrificing his grad students to bring horrible monsters through a portal from the Feywild. Thaïs finally gets to use both of her new 3rd-level spells, but neither of them helps at all, because this is D&D and there’s no “play to find out what happens”. Bah!

After that I went with Dave back to his lair, to have Easter dinner with everybody. It was very nice because friends and ham and glazed shallots and friends!

Played: Uno Flex. It’s like regular Uno, but you can make the cards do extra stuff if your checkmark is right-side-up.

Written: Only 188, but I had lot of socializing today.

Did a supervillain write this?

I managed to do most of the things I needed to do before being on call in the afternoon, and then I managed to fix the customers enough that I could go over to dye eggs and eat sushi with Ayse and Ken and fam. Marith insisted on driving me over, but could not stay because she was feeling poorly, which was very sad.

Written: 237 words. I was having too many infodumps, so I guessed that it was because I started the story too early and have jumped ahead to where I started it the first time. Will my greater knowledge of what’s going on make it better, or was it better when everything was mysterious?

Nightvale is one (1) years old today! That makes him a grown-up cat, not a kitten! He might still be kind of bb, though.

As usual after going into the office two days in a row, I am pretty blah, but I did a work and snuggled one or more cats.

Played: Ayse wants to play Minecraft together, so we spent some time tootling around the proposed seed in creative mode until everybody decided they like it. Someday, when we are not all busy with Easter, we will reboot it in survival mode and punch trees together.

Read: Edges (Linda Nagata): Start of a follow-on series to Deception Well and Vast and all those. One of the explorers returns home in a stolen ship, recruiting for an expedition back to the origins of humanity, where the people Deception Well left behind made Dyson spheres and then unmade them and now nobody knows what’s there. “The Inverted Frontier” is the title of the series.

Read: “The Speed of Time” (Jay Lake): Well, what do you expect, when members of your species listen to the voices from space?

Written: 226 words.

I told them how beautiful and chompy they are, instead of reminding them that their brains are the size of walnuts, so I’ll count this one.

Went to the office, got almost the last desk, ate some Chinese(?) food, did a work. I’m not sure how this is going to work when the whole company is supposed to be in the office on Thursdays.

Read: Blood Blade vol 1 (Oma Sei): Vlad the Impaler returned to life as a cute young vampiress and protected her corner of Eastern Europe for hundreds of years until steampunk mad scientists send their minions to annoy her. Ultraviolence ensues. No, I don’t think it’s supposed to make more sense than that.

Read: Whoever Steals This Book vol 1 (Nowaki Fukimidori, Kakeru Sora): Book-hating youngest member of a famously book-loving clan discovers that when people steal books from her family’s private library, they get cursed, and she’s the curse. Adventures in surreal book worlds ensue, with a helpful dog-girl-spirit-thing.

Written: 428 terrible words.

HI JUS!

Went to the office, ate some Ethiopian mushrooms and injera, did a work, came back home.

Read: Soara and the House of Monsters vol 1 (Hidenori Yamaji): After spending her entire life training to fight monsters, Soara goes to sign up on the very day the war is cancelled. Distraught, she wanders the wilderness until she falls in with a band of dwarves who are going around doing bespoke construction for monsters who want to use this new human idea and live in houses instead of found dens. Very much the sort of manga with double-page spreads of the monster houses with the fantasy materials and monster-specific features called out. Soara’s character arc is obviously going to be learning to value herself for anything other than monster-killing power.

Read: Free Period (Ali Terese): Two middle-school troublemakers get sentenced to do something constructive with their energy, and end up coopted into/coopting the project to get period supplies in all bathrooms. It’s like 50% period equity, 50% nobody knows what to do with these girls who have so much energy, and 20% fart jokes. Having never been a middle-school girl, I have no idea whether this is accurate, but it seems plausible.

Read: Blade of the Moon Princess vol 3 (Tatsuya Endo): Look, it’s another faction on the Tainted World, and they also have a grudge against the Imperial family. What were the odds of that?

Written: 279, although maybe I should have written less and gone to bed earlier.

Sigh.

Also a day of work, or at least attempted work.

Played: Nothing, Ken has class from 4-8 in the morning all this week.

Read: The Scratch Daughters (HA Clarke): Sequel to The Scapegracers, in which Sideways tries to get her [SPOILER] back without going mad or alienating her gorgeous and increasingly [SPOILER] coven, and also makes off with one of the enemy. Her dads are the best.

Written: 259, but they are probably all the wrong words.

But I lack fandom, so I will have to leave that to others.

I guess I wasn’t completely unproductive at work today, although it kind of felt like it. Petted some kitties, did some laundry, stuck a new thing in my arm, checked that I’m not coughing because of COVID.

Read: Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou omnibus 4 (Hitoshi Ashinano): Human boy is growing up and leaving, mysterious aircraft is leaving, human girl is thinking about growing up and leaving, Osprey is still there. At this rate, the next volume could be a proper conclusion, although I don’t know what it would look like.

Read: Ogami-San Can’t Keep It In vol 3 (Yu Yoshidamaru): It’s hard being Ogami and dating Yaginuma. It’s also hard being Yaginuma and existing in society, what with people having bodies all over the place.

Written: 156. I blame capitalism.

I did not have any cheesesteaks today, but I did have a bunch of leftover barbecue and also pie, which was probably at least as unhealthy.

The one useful thing I did today was get supplies. I also avoided buying unnecessary books, so, uh, go me?

Written: 453. How did that happen? Does knowing where I’m supposed to be going with this story actually help? Weird!

I did successfully observe this, so intensively that I could not get out of bed until after 10! Although next year Nightvale and Sage will both be officially grownup cats.

Once i was able to escape, I did the shopping and the other shopping and the pastrami and the additional shopping and a lot of crafting in Shop Titans so I could complete my bounty before the deadline and some writing (not last thing at night!) and reading, instead of being a useless lump all day.

At dinner time, Marith and. went to Monkeycat Towers to eat many barbecues and bask in the affection of friends. People said many nice things about me, just because we were celebrating my birthday or something. I am not as good at eating barbecue as I used to be, but I’m better at accepting compliments. About even on accepting parasite-rated chocolate cream pies.

Read: Spy x Family vol 11 (Tatsuya Endo): Of course Anya used her powers to get through it

Read: The Tiger Won’t Eat The Dragon Yet vol 1 (Hachi Inaba): Once upon a time(?) in a land where beasts can talk and sometimes take human shape, a tiger brings down a young dragon. She decides he’s too small to eat now, so she should raise him to be a more suitable meal, and that’s where things start to go wrong. The beasts have clothes in their human forms (suspiciously modern ones in the dragon’s case) but there’s otherwise no sign of civilization or humans, so I guess it’s like a fable.

Written: 227. Could have been more, but I caught up on this instead.

I feel like my youth has a slightly higher number than it did on Tuesday, oddly enough.

Did some capitalism, although as usual after two days in a row of going to the office I was not that swift.

Watched: The Ancient Magus’ Bride 2.5-6: More personal drama, of students Chise already knows and ones that are new to her, but so far it has not bubbled over into violence in the halls. Snakes are friends!

Read: “The Chatbot and the Drone” (Geoffrey A Landis): What it says on the tin!

Written: Finally decided that even though my outline isn’t done, the last line is “need better plan” and I can revisit that once I’ve gotten the characters up to that point for real. 275 words of actual text.

Yay me, I guess? I could have justified taking the day off work, and in fact should have since I have twenty days of vacation to use up this year, but instead I went to the office and ate beef and eggplant and fried rice and helped some customers.

Read: She Professed Herself Pupil of the Wise Man vol 1 (dicca*suemitsu, Ryusen Hirotsugu, fuzichoco): VR game, can’t log out, but the best summoner in the game is flung thirty years into the future and stuck in the girly avatar he was fiddling with as an alt to his Srs Bzns Elder Sage avatar. Now there’s one or more wars coming, his buddy who lived through the entire thirty years has spurred a military-industrial revolution, etc. Feels very choppy, probably because it’s only taking the high points from the original light novels and isn’t meant to stand on its own.

Read: My Happy Marriage vol 1 (Akumi Agitogi, Rito Kohsaka, Tsukiho Tsukioka): So far very similar to the anime. Maybe we’re getting lore in different spots, but it’s the same lore. Maybe the trip to town went differently? Or maybe what I’m remembering is from a later trip. Anyway, Miyo-ella and her horrifying abusive family and her beautiful fiancé.

Read: Cascade Failure (LM Sagas): It does successfully have some A Long Way To A Small Angry Planet found-family energy, but it’s all betrayals and murder plans instead of interspecies romance. The world-building is not great, planets are bigger than that, which means slower; no future character ever needs to make more than a single C20 cultural reference per series in which they appear; and even though we here in 2024 are in a consolidation phase of the capitalist hellscape, I am dubious about a single megacorp owning the entire galactic arm. On the other hand, I stayed up until a million o’clock at night to finish it.

Written: 130 more of adventure, the parts the PCs wouldn’t see if they sat in town instead of engaging with the adventure. Seems unlikely they’ll do that in practice, although I really need to test it before taking it to a con. For a change.

Thus implying all Hufflepuffs are atheists, which as we know from Yes, Prime Minister is completely consistent with a career in the Anglican clergy.

Went to the office, ate a chicken pot pie, helped some customers.

Read: The Splendid Work of a Monster Maid vol 1 (Yugata Tanabe): A beloved cat learns to assume human form, but alas her human has died, so she goes to the Monster World to find work and falls in with spy-maids working for the deposed demon king. Wacky hijinks ensue, with remarkably little fan service for a manga about three monster girls in maid outfits.

Read: The Queer Girl is Going to Be Okay (Dale Walls): Three queer girls in Texas, trying to survive their senior year of high school despite Texas and families, one of them is making the eponymous documentary as her only chance at getting enough scholarship to not be stuck caring for her disabled father forever.

Read: Quality Assurance in Another World vol 1 (Masamichi Sato): VR game, can’t log out, except the protagonist is not a player but a playtester, and the only one still doing his job instead of using debug mode to enslave the locals. The extremely primitive programming paradigm they’re testing isn’t consistent with full-immersion VR and at least semi-sapient AI, which makes it hard to take any of it seriously.

Written: 118 of default timeline for the Big Bad Con adventure.

Also World Storytelling Day. Combine the two and you get magic!

More work.

Kit returned from being GoH at a conference in Florida, which sounds like it was amazing.

Played: Nothing, Vivian was out and Ken never showed (possibly because he saw Vivian was out).

Written: 156, still plotting, not actually getting to a resolution. Might be bogging down in detail, although it’s not like the detail doesn’t have to be put in at some point.

A very good day, should come around more often.

I feel like I should say more about work, but… it’s just work. Whatever.

Read: Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou omnibus 3 (Hitoshi Ashinano): Alpha goes for a walk around Japan, because what’s a year when civilization is fading away and you’re an immortal(?) robot? The leftovers of the past seem a little inconsistent, but then that’s what you might expect from a handful of random leftovers.

Read: Sheep Princess in Wolf’s Clothing vol 1 (Mito): Wolf-lady butler discovers that the beautiful sheep-girl princess she serves is smitten with her. Gay hijinks ensue.

Watched: The Ancient Magus’ Bride 2.1-4: Chise goes to magic school, and Elias signs on as a teacher so she won’t be unguarded. So far pretty much the same as the College arc in the manga, but I’m having a slightly easier time keeping track of the new characters. Bug-nurse is even more disturbing in color.

Written: 140 of planning. This seems like a final confrontation, but I don’t see how it can be resolved in a satisfying way. Maybe it’s only the confrontation where it becomes clear that things cannot be resolved peaceably.

A good holiday to ignore, really. I don’t need beer, green or otherwise.

Played: Librarians Errant. The team had a brilliant plan to heist the manuscript full of old secrets that their boss wanted, but were thwarted when the people they wanted to offer their book-cataloging services to were out of town for the season. Fortunately(?), the house was in the process of being robbed by bullywugs and other such undesirables, so the team was able to look good by saving the surviving the guards, defeating a recurring bullywug villain, and then rushing down to prevent a hag and her lizardman flunkies from rifling the vault. The lizardman shamans had obnoxious spells like heat metal and roomful of crocodiles, but Thaïs managed to do 65 points of damage with a second-level spell slot (not even a second-level spell, it was upcast!) and also realized the hag had not actually phased through the wall but was lurking invisibly. It was painful and messy, but victory in combat and a victory in refraining from stealing anything except the one object thney were there to steal (unless somebody passed the GM a note and I didn’t notice). The manuscript told the team many salacious and useful things, so now they are packing for a trip to Yartar by way of the Kryptgarden Forest, in search of further volumes of The Magical Education. Level UP!

I tried to get ice cream on the way home, but I had actually eaten so much gaming food that I didn’t want any.

Written: 114

It seems weird for nations where pandas are not native to have a national panda day, but on the other hand, pandas!

I tried to get up at a sensible hour to do the thing, but the cats trapped me in bed until I fell back asleep. Alas.

After doing the thing, and then not doing any things for the whole afternoon, I went with Marith to see Jus in her school production of Annie Jr (ie, abridged). Singing! Dancing! Villainous plots! Propaganda for the morbidly wealthy! A happy ending! It was the last show, so Jus was full of feelings, but that’s okay. I hear it often happens to actors.

Read: Daisy Chainsaw (Charlotte Laskowski): Brutal tactical magical-girl combat. Choose your weapons from among such things as baseball bats, rollerblades, guns, microphones, and of course chainsaws, and try to survive high school until the villains attack and you have a transformation sequence and it’s time to fight. Still in a fairly primitive state, but it has a pixel-art aesthetic and magic rollerblades and dismemberment rules.

Written: 220, although some of it was adventure design that I did earlier but hadn’t logged.

If I had gone to the office, I could have had delicious pie, but instead I went to the dentist and got my teeth cleaned and drilled and filled. Hopefully this will extend my ability to eat pie into the future, even if it was much less delicious in the short term.

Written: 123. I think even when I’m planning ahead I get too bogged down in not resolving the plot, but at least this way there’s less to unwrite.

Are you Kenough?

Getting up early to commute in to the office was only a little worse than usual, because I already hate it. Did some work, finally ate goat curry with basmati rice (third time lucky!). Turns out I don’t like goat that much, at least not bone-in, but it’s good to eat different things.

Read: The Illustrated Guide to Monster Girls vol 1 (Suzu Akeko): Unlike basically every other manga about monster girls, it’s not all fan service. In fact, it’s not any of that kind of fan service, but it’s a lot of violence (against characters who regenerate, and are terrible people anyway, so whatever) and evil school hijinks.

Read: Alpi the Soul Sender vol 2 (Rona): Alpi meets another Soul Sender, who is older, better trained, and prettier, and also taunts her with information about her parents that she’s searching for. Surely they will become friends eventually.

Written: 129 again. There aren’t that many numbers that are between 100 and bedtime, I guess.

Why yes, it is made with real Girl Scouts!

My early morning meeting is still scheduled on UK time, so until they start BST in a couple weeks, it’s not early!

Read: Aftermarket Afterlife (Seanan McGuire): After like a dozen books of using their genetic luck powers, overwhelming telepathy, and assorted other OPness to fuck around, the extended Price family (every member of which is on screen) gets to find out.  The ghost babysitter is the viewpoint character, possibly so that she can angst about not protecting her family. Her solution to the larger-scale problem is one that I often consider, though, so I approve.

Played: Nothing, everybody was a little floppy so there was no one to energize us into playing Lancer.

Written: 129.

Yes, it’s the day after Daylight Savings Day, and I wanted to nap, but did not manage to do so. Or maybe I napped very lightly for the whole day.

Watched: Hilda and the Mountain King: Movie between the second and third seasons, following directly from the cliffhanger at the end of the second season which I had completely forgotten until now. Like so much Hilda, appears scary but is wholesome. Kind of.

Written: 114. What am I even doing with this?

This year it’s also International Day of Awesomeness, which is just wrong. So wrong.

Did my pastrami and shopping and stuff, then was super-useless.

Read: Bioshifter (Thundamoo): I really liked this, but all the content warnings for every kind of horror and trauma and philosophy. It starts off with a teenaged girl who dreams of being a spider-monster gnawing her way up through endless wood, all night every night, until finally in the first chapter she breaks through. Link is to the free version, which isn’t caught up to the Patreon yet but will be. Also available on Amazon.

Read: Nightblade (Scott Malthouse): Kind of like D&D4e, but with all the lists taken out so it fits in four pages.

Read: The Abandoned Heiress Gets Rich With Alchemy and Scores an Enemy General! (Miyako Tsukuhara, Satsuki Sheena): Alchemist with tragic past buys the enslaved general of an enemy nation to help her harvest components from monsters, but her heart isn’t in oppressing him.

Written: 148. Wait, if I diverge from the first draft, that means I have to have new plot!

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH! There, how was that?

Had to be on call in the afternoon, and there were annoying customers, but I escaped to Monkeycat Towers for anime night anyway.

Watched: Princess Tutu 5-6: Uh oh, Fakir is getting suspicious! Although he was pretty sus to begin with.

Watched: Sacrificial Princess & The King of Beasts 8: Hah, called it!

Written: 177. Got to a point in planning where I diverge from the first graph, so that’s probably something.

Another one that should be every day.

Did some kind of work thing, I guess. Didn’t have to stay late because it’s an off week, but did nothing useful with the extra time except order a pizza.

Watched: Nothing, no Marith.

Read: Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou omnibus 2 (Hitoshi Ashinano): More of hardly anything happening. We meet like one new character, but mostly it’s the same half a dozen people on a stretch of barely-inhabited now-coastline. Still no idea what happened to humanity, but no one seems to care much. Things are just how they are.

Written: 168 of notes on the thing that has to be completely rewritten (no, the other one that needs a complete rewrite). I know more about what was going on outside the MC’s awareness, though.

I probably did some kind of math today!

Also went to the office and ate a burrito.

Read: Witch Hat Atelier Kitchen vol 2 (Hiromi Sato, Kamome Shirahama): More recipes and fanfic vignettes.

Read: The Scapegracers (HA Clarke): A sullen teenaged lesbian witch is surprised to find that her people are the popular girls at school, but they really are, even in the face of creepy patriarchal witch hunters and hot lesbian betrayal and really visceral magic. Made me realize I don’t know how to write characters who have either feelings or bodies, never mind both at the same time.

Written: 119, somehow.