Author: Trip the Space Parasite

Ovodiablerism is the best!

However, office lunch was Nepalese(?) which included two or more types of paneer plus garlic naan(ish) and no deviled eggs. Still good!

Read: Dandadan vol 5 (Yukinobu Tatsu): Another bizarre encounter with cryptids and cultists and aliens, most of them dumb or horny or both.

Read: Omega Morales and the Legend of La Lechuza (Laekan Zea Kemp): A twelve-year-old from a magical family but with defective(?) magic of her own and her annoying cousin and friendly ghost are stalked by an owl-witch-monster and also annoying middle-schoolers and racist buttheads and family that is not as helpful as they think. It’s hard being twelve.

Read: Me and My Beast Boss vol 1 (Shiroinu): A human (and therefore marginalized) office lady gets promoted to work with the terrifying lion-guy CEO, who is terrifying but also appreciates her abilities. Possible romance!

Written: Still FAIL.

As opposed to yesterday, which was just my personal cat day!

The cats are still very feline. Sage is remarkably energetic for a cat who has never had a single morsel of food in her entire life, ever, although after eating an entire cat of wet food she cuddled in my arms for an extended period. Nightvale jumped onto Marith’s shoulders when she came to visit, which I can only interpret as a sign of approval.

Played: Librarians Errant. After being manipulated into alarming situations by professors and/or sororities the library had offended, and finding that the eldritch tentacles unleashed by Flint and Shia in the first episode had taken to nibbling on the town’s supply of fine confections, our librarians junior library staff head back to Koboldtown only to find it being bullied by bullywugs! There’s a big fight, but the important parts are that Flint leaps down from the rooftop and chops the bullywug leader right in half, and Lily gets swallowed by a giant frog and carried off. Once they track her down, there’s another fight, but the leader of the bullywugs escapes with the book that was the entire reason they came down here. Thaïs only used one of her spell slots, so this was obviously a less strenuous adventure than last time, no matter what the other characters say.

Watched: Helluva Boss 2.7: Another Fizzarolli episode, so sadly lacking in Loona or Millie, but otherwise good. Because seriously, fuck that guy!

Written: FAIL. There were cats that needed snuggles! But I did get caught up here and even figured out how to post pictures, so apparently the cats are less distracting.

With the help of Ken and Jus and Nonny (heroes of the revolution, all), I managed to get some cats into my den of squalor (instantly rendering it 1000% cooler).

Nightvale (“Mostly void, partially stars”)

 

Sage (Named by Jus, for her greenish eyes)

They are so much younger and more rambunctious than any of my previous cats!

Sage is mostly teeth, partially even more teeth. Nightvale is 1000% more chill. Augh I have cats what if something happens to them? What if they happen to something? Augh!

Read: Buffomet (ed Nero O’Reilly, Iris Jay, Mia “Hye” Mardikian): A collection of sexy pictures of everyone’s favorite infernal androgyne and/or other demons (possibly goat-like), diabolists, etc. Turned out to mostly not be to my taste, alas.

Written: How can I write? I have cats to distract me!

Ah, maybe that’s why I failed to obtain a black cat today, I’m in the US. Which is built around cars and the adoption people would not hand over the cats when I said I was going to carry them on the bus. I will have to make a better plan and try again.

Fortunately work was pretty quiet so my taking a few hours off to fail miserably wasn’t a problem.

Watched: Marith and I tried watching some Adventure Time, because apparently it is still a huge cultural phenomenon, but even with what Marith could remember of the curated episode list, it was still pretty uninteresting. Then we tried watching the pilot of the new cultural phenomenon, The Amazing Digital Circus, which was also not very interesting. It was just weird things happening to the main character that she can’t do anything about.

Written: FAIL.

It’s good that werewolves get some recognition!

Also no office today, I didn’t want to risk being late for the team meeting due to transit betrayal. That’s probably a pretty terrible reason, except that any reason to not commute is a good reason.

I exchanged email with the cat adoption person.

Read: Muted (Miranda Mundt): A webcomic about pretty gay witches in Louisiana and family trauma and demons and plants and family trauma and unwise decisions and also some family trauma. It is actually complete (125 episodes) so I can list it here.

Written: 186, which isn’t much, but at least I had a positive number two days in a row.

But isn’t that every day?

Apparently it was also sleep day, or more accurately, forget to set an alarm day, so I slept through my 1-to-1 with my boss. Fortunately he is cool, so it was okay. I even did a small amount of work.

Played: Lancer, kinda. We still had no Brooks, so we were able to wrap up the previous set-piece mecha battle and reap the rewards, we didn’t move onto the next one. I think we did make a couple of dice rolls, though, maybe?

Written: FAIL.

There’s one that didn’t age well.

Weekly reminder that you don’t hate Mondays, you hate capitalism.

Read: The Extremely Inconvenient Adventures of Bronte Mettlestone (Jaclyn Moriarty): A whimsical middle-grade adventure, in which a 10-year is sent across the secondary world to visit all of her many aunts, which reveals many interesting things about her relatives and also about the geomagipolitical situation. It gives me a Hilda vibe, despite also somehow feeling Australian.

Written: FAIL.

I have two of those!

I did get up at 6 to ride the bus for a long ways, and it paid off because there was almost no wait to get phlebotomized even without an appointment. Then, after a short break to recharge my phone and caffeine levels, I went to visit kitties. The one Ayse recommended was not particularly impressed with me, but there were two others who sat in my lap and purred me for various times. They are very nice cats, but now I have to overthink whether they are the right cats.

Written: 345, accumulated half a sentence at a time over the past however long.

There’s Marith right there! Also International Day of the Nacho, but nachos are something I seem to like more in theory than in practice,

I know I often write that I did nothing with a day, but this seems like even more nothing than usual. I didn’t even manage to read anything except webcomics, which I never manage to put on my reading list because they usually aren’t complete.

Customers apparently attacked before I was on call, but that wasn’t my problem.

I had to stop eating early because my brilliant plan to finally get the blood drawn that I’m supposed to by the end of the month might come to fruition tomorrow and I’m supposed to be fasting for that.

Written: Yep, more FAIL.

Within a reasonable confidence interval.

Brain? Brain? What is “brain”? If I had anything like that, I would not have had the cleaners come at the same time I was having a meeting.

Marith and I wanted to watch the new season of Our Flag Means Death, but it’s on some streaming service somewhere, not the streaming services on my TV. Fuck capitalism.

Watched: One Piece 1.1-2: I’d say it must get better later, or else there wouldn’t be 1087 episodes, but the first two were not good enough to make us want to watch any more. Maybe it’s just the bias of seeing it first, but I liked the opening of the live-action series way more.

Written: FAIL. Maybe I need to go back to 100 words per day.

 

Nailed another one!

Office lunch was Chick-Fil-A, which was not healthy, but also not that great (not even counting the homophobia thing). Cold fries.

Read: The Cruel Stars (John Birmingham): It has the buzzwords for modern SF, neural augmentation, space-time manipulation, a little Eclipse Phase (bioconservatives vs transhuman civilization), some Culture (obnoxious hovering ship AIs), but the SFnal elements don’t quite stick together, not even counting “geostationary orbit over the northern hemisphere”. Hundreds of years of enormous AIs should have made things weirder, IMHO. But I guess milSF is always like that.

Read: Life With an Ordinary Guy Who Reincarnated Into a Total Fantasy Knockout vol 1 (Shin Ikezawa, Yu Tsurusaki): On the upside, “total knockout” doesn’t mean breasts bigger than her head, and people struck by her beauty propose marriage or worship her as a goddess. However, massive heteronormativity (the whole schtick is because the leads could not recognize their feelings for each other if they were both men), and the MTF lead seems pretty young for all those offers of marriage.

Written: FAIL. Will I ever write anything again ever?

Slime for everyone!

I guess I did a better job of sleeping, so I was up to my usual level of uselessness.

Office lunch was “acai bowl with nuts”, which was some kind of superfood berry frogurt with granola and banana slices, or something. I ate it, but I feel no need to repeat the experience. It might have been cursed.

Read: Kings, Queens, and In-Betweens (Tanya Boteju): A queer teenager struggles with crushes on various girls, her self-perception as completely boring and lame, other people’s trauma, inability to hold her liquor, a missing mother, and the possibilities of drag.

Read: Blade of the Moon Princess vol 1 (Tatsuya Endo): The violent, unrefined teenaged princess of the Moon Kingdom gets stranded on Earth while escaping a coup and must try to not be a terrible person under difficult, even ridiculous, circumstances. Has a similar mix of violence and humor to Spy x Family, unsurprisingly.

Read: Hitomi-chan is Shy With Strangers vol 6 (Chorisuke Natsumi): Further adventures of the tall, busty, shark-toothed frosh and her shrimpy sempai. It’s okay, but I don’t know that I need to read much more of it.

Written: FAIL.

Isn’t that every day ending in y since at least sometime in November 2016?

You’d think the night after a night of poor sleep would have extra sleep, but no. That’s not even counting having to get up an hour and a half early to start a morning of four meetings and an afternoon of dentistry and laundry and not being able to eat until almost bedtime because my face was numb.

Played: Lancer (without Brooks). We scared away the smaller giant bile worms, but the larger ones had to be put down to make way for Alien Archaeology. On the upside, the explosions revealed a discovery of even greater significance. Also all those points I put into Agility paid off and I didn’t get slimed even once.

Read: Komi Can’t Communicate vol 27 (Tomohito Oda): In this volume, Komi and crew play Among Us, and then some people talk about kissing. Hardly any actual kissing takes place, because high school manga, but it’s cute anyway.

Written: FAIL.

 

After missing about a million sessions, we finally had Alternate Sunday Gaming and started Librarians Errant. After being assigned to get overdue books back from students and causing pretty much a riot (there were also exploding gophers involved), we got dragged into the search for a lost set of books, almost eaten by giant rants, ditched in the sewers with teenaged kobolds, almost eaten by giant frogs, and fed hot chocolate by the kobolds. There were two fights, Thaïs had two spell slots to cast thunderwave, it worked out perfectly. Surely next session will go just as well.

I was accosted by an antivaxxer at the bus stop. I told her she’s insane, but we parted without violence. (Should I have been nicer? I dunno, she was trying to kill me with covid.)

Written: FAIL.

Also National Curves Day, but I am much more like one of these than the other.

I read seven volumes of manga today, so that’s like making a dent in my backlog, but not like getting anything else done.

Read: Witch Hat Atelier vol 5-11 (Kamome Shirahama): So much conspiracy and crime and ethical dilemma and shipping and ancient forbidden magic and illegal cross-classing and old characters coming back and terrifying new characters. There is a lot of pretty heavy stuff about disability and sexual harrassment and systems of oppression, but also teamwork and friendship and birds made of water.

Written: 206. Am I terrible at this or what?

But don’t worry about that, being superstitious is bad luck.

I had no brain and accomplished no things today.

Watched: Murder Drones 1.4-6: Rewatching the two episodes before the latest only helped a little bit. It is still very confusing. They have a human to take care of now? But also robot dinosaurs! (The robot dinosaurs are also cursed.)

Written: FAIL.

And yet, I work in software. There is no ethical production under capitalism, or something.

Office lunch was burritos, so that was okay, or at least more interesting than I would have eaten at home. Also there was a lot of capitalism.

Read: With a Golden Sword (Rachel Aaron): Everybody’s favorite glob of faerie magic continues to defeat the asshole blood mage, but he has so many plans and allies that he takes a lot of defeating. She also finds out more about how she came to be what she is, which I would appreciate more if I remembered the magic system better.

Read: Witch Hat Atelier vol 3-4 (Kamome Shirahama): The second test, where we see some of why the ancient forbidden magic is so very forbidden, but the new witches solve problems with compassion and slightly less regard for the letter of the law than some might prefer.

Written: FAIL.

 

Nope, I fail at this one. I used to bring them to gaming sometimes.

Office lunch was salad again, sheesh.

Read: Aru Shah and the Nectar of Immortality (Roshani Chokshi): This is the volume where Aru and the rest have to come back from rock bottom to win the final battle. The end!

Read: Witch Hat Atelier vol 1-2 (Kamome Shirahama): It could be cute witches doing cute things, but there are conspiracies and ancient forbidden sorcery.

Written: I fail at this too. Maybe I should go back to writing about my teddy bears.

 

Because fuck that guy.

Work is not nearly as fun as gaming.

Read: The Dead Take The A Train (Richard Kadrey, Cassandra Khaw): It’s an urban fantasy world of horrifying magic that ranges from grotty to capitalist (all rich people are in fact cultists) and is about to destroy the world, but our drug-addled freelance magical fuckup and her mundane childhood friend are having an extremely wholesome romance. All the plot threads are left dangling at the end, so there better be another one.

Written: 195.

This is getting suspiciously more specific…

But never mind that, it’s been a whole week since Big Bad Con ended and I haven’t had any gaming since then. What am I doing wrong with my life? (Getting old, probably.)

Another day of accomplishing nothing.

Read: Komi Can’t Communicate vol 26 (Tomohito Oda): I can’t tell if any of the characters are new any more. This volume was mostly Komi and Tadano being cute, with a side of other people being cute and also Tadano’s family not being able to understand that he’s really dating Komi.

Written: 151.

You may be aware of cephalopods, but are they aware of you? What if they are?

The Trader Joe’s unionization effort has not called for a boycott yet, so I went grocery shopping as normal. Also I was on call all afternoon, but there was only one customer.

Read: The Witches’ Marriage vol 1 (Studio Headline): Beautiful Melissa wants to cold-heartedly befriend (romance?) adorable young Tanya to increase her magical and then dump her to find someone else, but Tanya is just too cute. In fact, although Melissa wants to be terrible, and there is an age gap, the whole thing is pretty cute.

Read: There’s No Freaking Way I’ll Be Your Lover! Unless… vol 3 (Musshu, Teren Mikami, Eku Takeshima): The horrible mess from the end of the previous volume gets resolved without anything terrible happening, but now our MC has another improbably hot girl trying to date her, and feelings are getting even more confused.

Read: Bruised (Tanya Boteju): Self-harm, roller derby, bisexual awakening, unhealthy coping mechanisms, found family, regular family.

Written: 246.

Do they mean the small woodland mammal, or something else? I guess I’ll have to ask them over and over and over to clarify.

Watched: One Piece 1.8: Yeah, the thing with Garp should have been much more drawn out, although of course streaming shows can’t ever delay gratification more than a few episodes. It was a decent season finale, with lots of yelling and the boss’s body never recovered.

Read: “The Air In My House Tastes Like Sugar” (ZZ Claybourne): African witches, mother and daughter, travel the world and get varying receptions from white people and their haunts. The oven thing totally makes sense in context.

Written: FAIL.

Teachers are in fact awesome, they probably deserve several days.

The bus did not show up when I expected it again, although the VTA website says it should have. Is it just getting cancelled for some reason? I guess I will have to check ahead of time next week.

Office lunch was Oktoberfest sausage and pretzels and sauerkraut. So many sausages. It was pretty great. The office itself was less great, being full of humans and their virus-spewing faceholes.

Read: Otherside Picnic vol 5-6 (Iori Miyazawa, Eita Mizuno, Shirakaba): It seems like they are figuring things out, but they are also slipping into the otherside more and more easily. Will they understand the otherside before being lost entirely? Is there a difference between those?

Written: 353 from the last time I counted up, which was sometime before the con. Whatever, that’s the word count I’m at now, even though hardly any of it was written tonight.

I’m falling down on the job! But not as much as VTA did when I went into the office this morning.

Office lunch was packaged supermarket sandwiches, which is what I normally eat for lunch, so a complete bust as far as bribery to commute.

Read: Otherside Picnic vol 3-4 (Iori Miyazawa, Eita Mizuno, Shirakaba): More otherside, less picnic! Unless by “picnic” you mean “hallucinatory terror”. Also drama, because none of these people is sensible and all of them are under a lot of stress.

Written: FAIL, but at least finished my con report. Tomorrow for sure! maybe.