Author: Trip the Space Parasite

Yum, flavor.

Even though I have to work late on Mondays, I had a surprise 8am meeting to interview a guy for a thing. He seems like an okay guy, but who can be actually great at 8am?

Read: Mage-Queen’s Thief (Glynn Stewart): Book 12.5 or so of the missiles in space where magic SF technology is actual magic, and the queen has finally found a boy who is not meh. Pity he’s a career criminal and also everybody is dead.

Read: Bloody Waters (Jason Franks): An aspiring rock star makes a deal with the devil (not for guitar skills, she has those) and rock and roll skulduggery ensues. This version of the devil is pretty chill, but don’t think you can get one over on him, no matter how confident you are.

Read: Chimera’s Star (Glynn Stewart): Book 14? The current generation of protagonist finally makes contact with the outer edges of the major setting element that has been lurking since book 3 or so.

Written: Gave up on fiction for now, started working on a script to quantify how many words I’ve edited instead of just counting words I’ve added. Will it work? Maybe. Will it make any difference? Also maybe.

Hi Earl!

Also Writer’s Rights Day, but that sounds like it’s probably a thinly-veiled move for copyright maximalism.

Played: Librarians Errant. Another quick expedition into Bibliospace, another tussle with mad books and thesauri, the life of a junior librarian is always intense. Then an assortment of tasks that all collide with Club Fair Day, where Beasley Knees is once again performing a summoning that can be interrupted by Lily’s pet monster book, resulting in crocodiles and mad cows everywhere. (The book definitely has some beef with Beasley.) Filling a campus quad with crocodiles is more impressive than filling a vault with crocodiles, but the lack of novelty reduces it from “holy shit, crocodiles everywhere” to “ugh, crocodiles everywhere”. The one crocodile Lily gets to talk to is actually very nice, but the rest are just a big mess that have to be put down. Sadly, the Entrepreneurship major who scammed the team’s kobold friend Toctasnir out of a bunch of money by monopolizing textbooks is not eaten, because Thaïs is not a murderer.

Did some flattening of hills to make my Black Castle of Blackness stand out more and also have room for expansive carrot farms. Mining out one block at a time takes forever, though. Maybe I’m supposed to be making TNT?

Written: 116. This is the worst.

Really, shouldn’t 259 days out of the year be World Oceans Day?

I managed to do some errands (but not all) and fail to get temporary checks printed out and still get home in time to play Minecraft be on call. The customers were quiet so I finished the exterior of my castle and the art installation/8-channel lavamatic in the basement, and made a proper setting for my Nether portal. Muahahahaha.

Ayse did not Minecraft with us, because she was busy publishing fanfic on AO3! (It was about a Minecraft actual play or whatever they’re called.) I am very proud of her!

Watched: Nothing, Marith doesn’t want to fall out of the habit of Saturday Night Anime but she also doesn’t want to die.

Written: 127. Still all terrible.

Apparently I am not a good atheist, because I got no hugs.

I did get up early because Friday is now the day of regular 8am meeting to go with the regular 9am meeting and people who have the late schedule on Friday just get to suffer. (The alternative is to make it a different person every week, which would be even more annoying.) Someday I will learn to sleep, maybe.

After mining three zillion iron to make a zillion buckets, I finally got my entire lava lake picked up (four chests full of lava buckets!), but I can’t figure out how to put it down so that it’s all smooth.

Read: Service Model (Adrian Tchaikovsky): A robot valet, having lost his job for obvious yet mysterious reasons, must make his way in the world, finding out what it is like (not good) and why it is that way (also not good).

Written: 105.

Rather have National New Eyes Day.

I didn’t go into the office today because I’ve already used up my office clothes for the week, but it turns out the office wasn’t closed for Wellness Day, so maybe I should have anyway? But I didn’t.

Read: Moonstorm (Yoon Ha Lee): It’s like The Machineries of Empire for YA: proper ritual behavior modifies the laws of physics, space conflict, depraved technologies but not as much personal depravity, divided loyalties, more Korean-flavored, etc. They don’t seem to be in our universe for a variety of reasons, but I can’t tell if that’s just magical realism or an actual plot point.

Written: 211, but this draft is really not as good. Ugh.

Do Impossible Burgers and the like count? Because those are good.

Went into the office again, ate some chicken strips, did some work.

Read: The Wrong Dead Guy (Richard Kadrey): Further adventures of the hapless thief who got recruited by the Men in Black and cannot stay out of trouble. There are plenty of dead guys in these hijinks.

Read: Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End vol 2-3 (Kanehito Yamada, Tsukasa Abe): Frieren continues retracing the path of the quest to destroy the demon king, picks up another short-lived protege of one of her old party members, and reveals some of why she is utterly terrifying.

Played: Minecraft. To smooth out this lava lake, I’m going to have to scoop it all up and put it all back down, which is going to require a lot of buckets. Time to start branch mining at Y=+16, I guess!

Written: 217 of Big Bad Con adventure notes, since I had some thoughts. I should try to get it tested or something.

Check!

Because the office is closed on Thursday for Wellness Day and also there is no gaming tonight (Ken is on vacation), I went into the office today. It was not particularly more useful than not going to the office, but hopefully I get points for showing willingness. Ate a pizza, did a work, chatted with my boss because he’s here this week.

Read: I Married My Female Friend vol 2 (Shio Usui)

Read: Flying Witch vol 10 (Chihiro Ishizuka): That’s why I didn’t recognize the new characters in 11 and 12, because I hadn’t read 10 where they were introduced!

Played: Nothing, Ken is on vacation.

Written: 171.

 

Really a pretty swell invention, even though I haven’t used one in ages.

Watched: Helluva Boss 2.7½: The Sally Mae-visits-Millie special. A bit of the old ultra-violence.

Watched: Helluva Boss 2.8: Marith is right, the fic writers already watched this episode 377 times in simulation and knew how it was going to go, but that didn’t make it less painful. And Blitz was almost a functional adult for some parts of the episode! (Loona, as usual, was secretly MVP.)

Watched: The Ancient Magus’ Bride 2.17-18: All the pieces of the doom are converging!

Written: 132.

This time I slept in on purpose, which obviously makes it much better, and woke up in plenty of time to run errands and then spend 9234562349 hours playing Minecraft. I finished moving stuff indoors, then mined an Imperial buttload of netherrack and smelted it all into nether bricks to make the bottom and edge of my moat. My mining tunnel got to a deposit of basalt (meh, I can make it at home) and blackstone (vital for any proper black castle) but then a stupid piglin leapt in the way of my pick and got mad and I ended up back home. I’ll have to go back and mine more blackstone later.

My castle isn’t even complete and I’m already planning a Nether garden for my portal. Not sure how far I can move it from its current position before it generates a new portal in the Nether and messes up the rail line, though.

Written: 201.

DInosaurs, milk, olives, pineapples, black bears, hazelnut cake, nail polish, …

I accidentally turned off my alarm, so I ended up sleeping in until after noon without even meaning to. No dinosaurs for me! However, I did make it to errands and back home in time for Saturday Minecraft. Marith showed me her village and fishpond and evil shrine and ginormous cavern, which were all very nice, definitely better than my black castle of blackness. I also got a bunch of stuff moved from the temporary work camp into the black castle of blackness, and barrels with signs so possibly I can find things.

Ayse did not play Minecraft with us because she was busy finishing up and posting her Minecraft SMP fanfic to AO3. I don’t know anything about the source, but it is a good story in its own right and gives me Amber vibes.

Watched: Sacrificial Princess and the King of Beasts 17-18: Apparently that wasn’t the final boss of the season, but he was super-annoying anyway.

Written: 242

Parrots are good with language, corvids are good with tool use, they should team up and take over the world.

I did not take over the world. I did some work, I played some Minecraft, I deliquesced into sludge.

That’s probably enough blackstone to finish my castle, or at least the top floor if not the entire roof and battlements.

Read: Chainsaw Man vol 2 (Tatsuki Fujimoto): The main character is easily manipulated by getting to second base, which is plausible for a lonely and poorly-socialized teenage boy, but meh. Also, new characters and the old ultra-violence.

Read: My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom vol 9 (Satoru Yamaguchi, Nami Hidaka): Katarina graduates from school and joins the workforce, but what do you mean there’s more romance targets for Maria and more doom flags?!

Read: Mysterious Disappearances vol 1 (Nujima): A former child prodigy author who feels washed up, mysterious teenagers, cursed books, urban legends, transformations, assorted mysteries. Kind of raunchy, but the mysterious stuff is actually interesting.

Read: Blood Blade vol 2 (Oma Sei): Further adventures of Dracula-reincarnated-as-a-young-girl and the people she keeps defeating and befriending by being totally OP, this time with an equally OP adversary.

Written: 152.

One out of two isn’t bad? (I’m no Meatloaf.)

Went into the office again, but this time all of us who are normally there were there to see our boss, except the one who’s out and the one who had to WFH so really it was just me and Coworker T. Found out that Coworker R is no longer with us, which is sad but honestly not surprising. Ate a rice bowl, sat on a customer call for hours.

Read: She Loves To Cook, and She Loves To Eat vol 4 (Sakaomi Yuzaki): More cooking, more eating, more love!

Played: Zoomwarts! Every magic castle is better with a troll in the basement, right?

Written: 177. I’m really not convinced this second draft is any better than the first draft.

Everybody likes otters, pretty much.

Went into the office, met my boss in person since he’s in town, ate a brisket sandwich, did a work.

Played too much Minecraft, didn’t even get that much sand.

Read: Glitch vol 3 (Shima Shinya): The plot thickens! Which is to say, the kids have gotten some explanation which may even turn out to be true, and now they know there’s time pressure.

Read: Witch Hat Atelier vol 12 (Kamome Shirahama): That’s a particularly distressing city-wide catastrophe! Also, this is going to have awful consequences for witch-mundane relations.

Written: 281. I’m not sure I like any of these words, though.

But more importantly, it’s the day Jus gets promoted out of middle school!

Since Support can’t all take Wellness Day off, I took today in lieu so I could go see Jus wear a spiffy dress and walk across a stage and get a certificate. There was surprisingly little shrieking, but a lot of slinky dresses for 8th grade. Afterwards, we waited until restaurants were open and had sushi and ice cream of celebration.

My niece is a high-schooler now. That can’t be right!

Played: Lancer. We defeated the last iteration of the boss and triumphed, but that didn’t really help all the people who had already been killed or were now abandoned by their corporate supply chain or whatever. It’s almost like summoning unfathomable intelligences from beyond space and time to commit war crimes is not as good an idea as Second Committee though. Now we have to figure out what to play next, and it’s probably going to be Kelsey running D&D5e. Maybe I should have volunteered, but nobody wants that.

Read: Strictly No Heroics (BL Radley): A high-school lesbian in a world where some people have superpowers and are basically police with all the corruption of mundane cops and less oversight gets mixed up in an exceptionally villainous plan and there’s a hot girl and many people who need to get what’s coming to them.

Written: 271.

Thanks, everybody who fought for democracy, and if you’d like to rise up and drag someone down to hell, I have suggestions…

Didn’t sleep in quite as much today, because I had to be on call from 13-19, but still a lot. Would have worked better if I hadn’t lost my sleep mask, but oh well. Spent a lot of the day playing Minecraft.

Written: 283.

No, really! I used to have hair!

Gaming is cancelled today, so I slept in forever and then some, and finally feel like I’ve caught up from when I stayed up too late reading a week and a half ago. Then after doing a lot of nothing, I went over to Monkeycat Towers to eat tasty, tasty fajitas. Jus had half a dozen of her friends over for a Shrieking Party, and one of the friends’ moms stayed to make sure there were no axe murderers, so I kind of vaguely helped Ayse make conversation. Nobody fled screaming, the kids had a great time, the fajitas were delicious, everything was good.

Written: 208.

Where’s my Babel fish?

Despite the lack of intra-aural translation services, I walked to grocery shopping for the first time in a million years. I was not slower than before (54 minutes from my door to the sandwich shop), but I could tell I had moved my legs. I need to do this more often, although I should have started before we got into the warm part of the year.

In the afternoon, we played Minecraft together. Dave gave me bookstore credit for a load of sand, so I finally got my diamond pick enchanted, and was able to get some more diamonds to make and enchant another one. Now I can do the thing where you mine ore with Silk Touch and then bring it home to harvest with Fortune III. I also got my castle torn down and rebuilt with better materials and made more progress. Now I need to get a bunch of wood to make more storage, see if I can make a basalt machine, mine a bunch of blackstone, grow produce to trade for emeralds, explore the many caves near my castle, make a new travel bed, plant bamboo for scaffolding, etc, etc.

No anime, Marith is still not feeling up to going places or doing things.

Written: 169. Had to go back and fix several sentences because I’m reading a book written in present tense and that makes me write in present tense. I guess there’s nothing stopping me from writing a story in present tense, but this one has too much written in past tense already.

Commemorating the day Baby Phoenix blew up an entire planet of asparagus people?

Played: No Zoomwarts, Marith is flat.

Read: Flying Witch vol 12 (Chihiro Ishizuka): Akane is kind of terrifying even when she’s sober.

Read: The Splendid Work of a Monster Maid vol 2 (Yugata Tanabe): The catgirl maid and her new friends the robot maid and flesh golem maid continue hunting down scattered pieces of their patron’s magic, and also becoming better friends.

Written: 198.

 

Turtles are good.

Went to the office even more tiredly, ate a pork curry that was surprisingly spicy for something delivered to a corporate office, did some work, butted into my coworkers’ conversations.

Read: Alpi the Soul Sender vol 3 (Rona): Finally, backstory about Alpi’s parents and the other soul sender! Also, mundanes being terrible.

Read: Flying Witch vol 11 (Chihiro Ishizuka): The level of magic in this series keeps getting higher and higher, and yet the characters are not any more serious.

Written: 189.

Also Canadian Immigrants Day, so one for Ken and one for me.

Went to the office, ate a barbecue pork sandwich, did a small amount of work.

Read: A Cat From Our World and the Forgotten Witch vol 2 (Hiro Kashiwaba): More people in the fantasy world are converted to cat lovers, as is only right and proper. It’s a pretty grim world, though, as bad as ours.

Read: The Everything Box (Richard Kadrey): A somewhat hapless thief in the magical crime underworld gets tapped to steal a box that everybody else also wants and hijinks ensue. Lots of hijinks, some murders, inept cultists, inept angels, secret government agencies, betrayal exes who inexplicably did not develop better taste in their time apart, etc.

Read: Otherside Picnic vol 9 (Iori Miyazawa, Eita Mizuno, Shirakaba): They are getting awfully blase about going to a dimension of death and fear. Surely that is going to continue to work out well for them. Also Sorawo might be coming to realizations.

Read: “We Travel the Spaceways” (Victor LaValle): Black magic realism, I guess? I liked it, but it was weird.

Read: Please Don’t Tell My Parents I’m A Giant Monster (Richard Roberts): Reread, because who doesn’t like a book about a disabled catgirl getting extra superpowers? I am still kind of waiting for the book from Claire’s PoV, though.

Written: 134.

Pretty sure they would all give up their calendar day in exchange for No Exceptions to Minimum Wage Day, though.

Played: Nothing, Kelsey is dead from work and it’s Ken’s anniversary or something. Next week for sure?

Read: The Ancient Magus’ Bride vol 18-19 (Kore Yamazaki): The last volume I have, which fortunately is also the end of the arc! Some people got what was coming to them, some people got less than they deserved. I wonder what the next arc will be? Chise and Elias don’t seem to have been thrown out of the College, but maybe that’s just because the administrative hearing won’t be convened until after winter holidays.

Read: Hitomi-chan is Shy With Strangers vol 8 (Chorisuke Natsumi): Apparently I only liked this one for the gimmick, because now that nobody is terrified of the FMC and it’s just characters, meh. I think it has to come off the list.

Read: Chainsaw Man vol 1 (Tatsuki Fujimoto): Apparently super-popular, so I picked up the first volume to see why. A young boy, trapped into hunting monsters by the yakuza holding his late parents’ debt (apparently this is how Japanese law actually works?!), is betrayed and murdered and comes back to life by merging with his monstrous chainsaw-puppy. Recruited by the civic monster-hunting squad, cute female leader treats him like a dog (ah, that must be the fan appeal), lots of transformation violence, etc. Presumably there will be many power-ups in later volumes. Obviously it would be better if all major characters were female.

Read: The Pale House Devil (Richard Kadrey): Supernatural hitmen with hearts of gold (14K or so) get roped into working for a horrible old man who called up that which he could not put down, take a shine to his daughter, betrayal and murder ensue continue. I would read more about these characters.

Written: 133.

Two great observances that go great together!

Watched: The Ancient Magus’ Bride 2.15-17: That actually seems pretty tame for a bunch of teenagers locked up for weeks on end.

Read: The Ancient Magus’ Bride vol 17 (Kore Yamazaki): Now I’m ahead of where we are in the anime, and yikes!

Written: 268. Am I drawing this scene out too much? Am I summarizing the wrong parts? Am I just an extremely bad writer?

Boo carbs.

Today I ran two (2) errands, with some amount of success. I was still very tired and very bad at Minecraft, though. Dave hooked my portal up to the Nether Railway Network, through no virtue of my own, and I mined a bunch of blackstone and basalt off one of the train tunnels. Maybe they will be better for a dark tower than the black concrete that got exploded anyway.

Read: The Mammoth Book of Extreme Science Fiction (ed Mike Ashley): A collection of stories that take “literature of ideas” seriously. “Wang’s Carpets” (Greg Egan) is here, along with many other stories about the far future, extreme conditions, transhumans, technology with unintended consequences, or some combination, written between 1909 and 2006.

Written: 131.

Astronomy brings us so many weird knowledges!

I stayed up too late reading because I am dumb, so instead of getting errands done, I mostly twitched uselessly all morning. I did feed a cat, though.

In the afternoon, I had to do work, which was poorly-timed enough that I missed seeing Jus’s show. Boo, customers!

Also I played Minecraft so badly that a creeper destroyed a bunch of my storage and most of the items despawned before I could recover them. Obviously it’s time to wall off my base and fill it with torches.

Written: 141. Too much Minecraft.

If it were National Pickle Day, I’d presume it meant pickled cucumbers, but it’s international, so does that mean it includes other pickled items? Or is it just pickle imperialism?

Went to the office, ate a butter chicken, did a work.

Read: The Ancient Magus’ Bride vol 15 (Kore Yamazaki): This is apparently as far as I’ve ever read before, and also right about where we are in the anime. Everything after this will be new and surprising!

Read: What Feasts At Night (T Kingfisher): Sequel to What Moves the Dead, Alex Easton and their henchman encounter another creepy mystery, this time in their own homeland.

Written: 116.

If I baked, my course would be clear!

Went to the office, ate a pineapple curry, did a work.

Read: The Ancient Magus’ Bride vol 13-14 (Kore Yamazaki): College arc continues with the field trip and the mysterious attacks, very much like the anime.

Read: The Dragon’s Soulmate is a Mushroom Princess! vol 3 (Hanami Nishine, poporucha): Finally we learn what the deal is with the mushrooms and the FL’s mysterious past and everything.

Read: “Fire Above, Fire Below” (Garth Nix): This seems familiar, but it’s not on my reading list so it must have been some other story about dragons and firefighters that I read?

Read: “The Necessary Arthur” (Garth Nix): “Against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain,” or in more modern terms, being a post-human entity of unfathomable power doesn’t mean you aren’t also a complete fuckup.

Written: 294. See, this is what makes me think I could increase my quota to 250.

Your private-equity flower bulbs will not save you from the most cursed of all days!

It is also Frog Jumping Day, and D&D needs way more secret frog magic and way fewer 1st-level wizards with the exact same carefully focus-grouped spells as other 1st-level wizards.

Watched: The Ancient Magus’ Bride 2.13-14: Creepy alchemists, creepy alchemy, monster-murdering class.

Written: 300 exactly.

Did I remember to text my mother? I did not.

I did tell Rachel Happy Mother’s Day when I went over to game, at least.

Played: Librarians Errant. Jeremy made us do a bunch of world building about historical Masked Lords of Waterdeep and their families/heirs/successors. We might have been slightly ridiculous. Then the team made it back to the University with the second magic item and we leveled up. Now Thaïs can send a howling monster of shadow to annoy her enemy. Also I have to choose between fly (generally handy for a ranged combatant, similar to the leaping and skydiving magic she already has) and thunder step (escape and attack as a single spell, similar to the thunderous magic she already has but most similar to the one she never uses). Or of course another spell, but those seem like the two best that fit her affinity.

Played: Minecraft. I finally built a nether portal and experienced the horror that is the Nether. I had a shiny hat so the piglins were whatever, but hoglins and ghasts crushed me like the insect I am. I did mine some polished blackstone bricks from a bastion remnant, and lots of quartz and netherwrack and a surprising amount of gold before I gave up for the day.

Written: 239. My head is almost 1/30th as magic as Kit’s!