Also Frankenstein Day, which I presume means it’s cobbled together from hours stolen from days past and brought to life with ethically questionable amounts of electricity.
No office today, which on the one hand, no commuting, but on the other hand, no lunch. Fortunately I have enough random foodstuffs to avoid dying.
Written: 254.
Like the right to stare blankly into space all day. That’s in the UN charter, right?
Played: Lancer. We didn’t have Kelsey (job hunting is the worst) and ended up not having much Vivian, so although we did some exploration and found the planet was even less well-surveyed than we already thought, we couldn’t do much diplomacy or NHP investigation.
Read: Shikimori’s Not Just A Cutie vol 3 (Keigo Maki): Shikimori, her cute boyfriend, and their friends (including the one who looks like Bakugo) have summer vacation fun with surprisingly little fanservice.
Written: FAIL.
Not much dreaming today, just working. We have so many people out that an executive decision was made that nobody should go into the office week, we just don’t have time to waste on that nonsense. (IMHO, we never have time to waste on that nonsense.)
Read: Dandadan vol 4 (Yukinobu Tatsu): Horny aliens dispatched for the moment, now there’s a haunted house (probably also weirdly horny) and a rival for the ML, who shows no signs of running off with the FL’s rival to get them both out of the way.
Written: 208. Is writing fiction like dreaming? Maybe I should have written kitten words today.
For the first time in quite a while, I went over to Monkeycat Towers to play Minecraft. We didn’t do much, but it was fun anyway. Then we ate Frogmore Stew, which I guess is a regional variant of shrimp boil specific to one small island off the coast of South Carolina? It’s not actually stew, since the traditional method of serving is to pour it out onto a newspaper-covered picnic table and let the juice soak into the beach, leaving only Old-Bay-seasoned shrimp, sausage, potatoes, and corn to eat with fingers. It was definitely better than sitting at home in front of my computer all day.
Written: FAIL.
But I have no dog, so the big event today was first signups for Big Bad Con. As usual, at 12:00:01 everybody clicked to sign up for their favorite game and the website caught on fire. After a couple of hours of watching the BBC team do the sorts of things I tell people to do in my day job, the website was functional enough that I could get my two signups through. Now I am scheduled for Invisible Sun and The Gnoles’ House and can stop worrying about it until Monday week.
Watched: Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid 1.8-9: A new dragon. Also too much of the old dragons, or at least the shota-con one. This is not a very good show, but it beat staring blankly into space while I ate dinner.
Written: 215.
Today’s meeting fact: Hippos can’t swim. That’s not buoyant fat, it’s all muscle and bone to WRECK YOUR SHIT. Bonus fact, hippos are an invasive species in South America.
Watched: Good Omens 2.4-5: I’m pretty meh about the flashbacks, and in general just not liking this as much as the first season. Apparently Pratchett did add something. But maybe the last episode will bring it all together and I will understand the genius.
Read: Dandadan vol 3 (Yukinobu Tatsu): The annoying aliens are back, with reinforcements, not that it’s going to do them any good against the naked yokai powers of Earth.
Read: Shikimori’s Not Just A Cutie vol 2 (Keigo Maki): Further slices in the life of a very femme-presenting but tough and cool high-school girl and her less butch and also cursed boyfriend.
Written: 325. That’s more like it, brain.
Apparently everybody thinks I’m the bee’s knees for getting that customer working yesterday, so that’s good. Not so much meeting today; I was able to get other stuff done, which was nice. Also not betrayed by the train this time.
Written: FAIL. Brain, why?
Sadly, we had burritos at work. Also customer calls. So much customer call. We got one customer working again, though. Then the train was very late, so I had extra customer call from the station while waiting.
Read: Heart of Malice (Lisa Edmonds): A magic PI with an extremely traumatic past gets zorched by magic a lot. Also there’s a hot werewolf guy and a sketchy vampire guy and some kind of mystery.
Written: FAIL.
Make sure your cat gets proper medical care!
I don’t have any cats. This should probably lead me to question my life choices.
Boss B is back from vacation. He has a dinosaur-patterned shirt, so is entitled to declare victory.
Played: Lancer. We had to escape from the self-unearthing menace, which was not that hard because even not counting the Sunzi that teleports and teleports and teleports (sometimes transitively, sometimes intransitively), we’re a really mobile team. Probably for the best that it didn’t take long, because Ken was feeling poorly.
Read: “MUGWUMP 4” (Robert Silverberg): An early example of human minds being exempt from time loops, which turns the comedy into horror.
Written: FAIL.
Not sure I have anything witty to say here.
Written: 113. Turns out I don’t actually know what’s supposed to happen next.
They’re an important source of protein for bats!
Finally managed to produce a medical sample and get it to UPS. Now I can stop worrying about getting it done and worry about the results!
UPS was so efficient that I did not have to wait for a next bus and was early to gaming, but that’s okay (I say as the person not hosting). It was a special gaming session, though, because after approximately 90745934 years, Chrisber has gaming with us again! Also he brought his offspring, Teo. Chrisber has a mustache now, and a lot of white in his hair, but he is still very much Chrisber. I don’t know Teo well yet, but he seems okay for a, you know, young person.
I didn’t have any brilliant ideas, and Dave’s idea did not garner sufficient support, so Jeremy is running D&D5 again (sigh). We are playing random university bozos who are about to be recruited into the Librarians Errant where we will track down dangerous, rare, or overdue books. My character is the result of an ethical experiment that turned her into a shadow magic sorcerer, so once again I am the only one without Charisma as a dump stat.
Written: FAIL. Apparently making up one (1) D&D character uses all my creativity for the day. I definitely blame capitalism for this.
Had to wake up early for cleaners, but then managed to go back to sleep like a useless lump for a while. My body refused to produce medical samples, so eventually I gave up and went grocery shopping. The UPS place is open tomorrow morning, so if my body cooperates before then, I can drop the sample off before gaming tomorrow.
Thought some more about game design. I think I had some of these ideas before. They weren’t any good then either.
Written: 267 new words, plus a little editing.
Yeah, I suck.
Had to work until 19:00 today, but at least there wasn’t an ongoing customer emergency and I was able to log out and die in a pit. I tried making nachos, which sort of worked, although the chips got completely soggy so obviously something wasn’t quite right. Maybe I need to melt the cheese substance separately and pour it onto the chips, instead of microwaving them together?
Written: FAIL.
Everybody loves the void!
Traffic was horrible, probably because parents all drive their children to school in individual vehicles, so I didn’t make the transfer to the train, but the long bus got me there like twenty minutes later, which isn’t too bad. Customers were still somewhat numerous, but not like yesterday. I did a command line thing, it was okay.
I could not find the things I was looking for in my useless room of useless piles of useless comics.
Watched: Good Omens 2.3: Oh good, more ominousness!
Read: A Restless Truth (Freya Marske): It’s the same magical intrigue from A Marvellous Light, but the quest has extended to America, which can only be reached by water, so it’s time for the ocean liner murder mystery! With enthusiastic sapphic interludes.
Written: FAIL.
Went to the office, didn’t die, still a lot of customers.
Spent the commute making notes on how to turn Champions into something that isn’t even slightly like Champions. None of my ideas are consistent with each other, and none of them would work on their own.
Written: FAIL. Have I lost momentum? Or do I just hate capitalism?
Friends are good!
Finally found out enough about what was up with the office that I don’t feel entitled to more information, and also probably I won’t die tomorrow.
Played: Lancer. After our downtime, we went to check out some mysteries, and one of them turned out to be a robot army. I guess we’re about to find out whether we made the right choices when levelling up.
Written: FAIL.
Why are there so many customers, and why do they all think our product should function correctly? Ended up staying late because it’s Monday and then an hour later than that so the next person wouldn’t be alone.
Tried to get more information about why the office was closed last week, but no dice.
Written: Didn’t write any, but moved stuff around and edited a little and got things set up to edit more if I ever become less stupid.
Accomplished mostly nothing today, but have to be on call for special customers all night.
Written: 134 words, bringing me to 1522 for the final week and 15275 for the ten-week-long challenge. That is right at 150% of my goal, so that’s good, except my goal was 1/3 of what it was last time, so that’s bad. (The frogurt is also cursed.)
I mostly did nothing today, but finally in the hottest part of the day I bestirred myself to do a thing and another thing and a bonus thing and also get dinner. Now I only have to do some of the things tomorrow, not all of the things.
Read: Battle of the Linguist Mages (Scotto Moore): Wow, that was quite a thing! More deranged than Your Favorite Band Cannot Save You, at length like Wild Massive (and with a crossover of sorts) so it just keeps getting more and more craziness.
Written:176/1388/15141. I made it over the 150% mark with one day to spare!
Mine was several days ago, but close enough!
After telling everybody in the office “Go home for the rest of the week. No reason.” the company told everybody “Get back in the office this week. No reason.” That does not make me confident that they have identified and mitigated any safety issues.
Watched: Good Omens 2.2: I am in awe of the beard. Also, angels r dum.
Written: 220/1212/14965.
Read: Yokohama Station SF vol 1 (Yuba Isukari, Gonbe Shinkawa): After humans get tired of always doing construction work on the Yokohama train station (I assume), they make it self-constructing. Centuries later, the island of Honshu is a single giant train station and humans have built a new civilization in its depths. A hapless youth from one of the scraps of unbuilt land around the edges must go into the station and navigate its capitalist dystopia. This feels like it would be better as prose.
Written: 316/992/14745.
No commuting for me! Yet somehow sleeping in until the normal time did not make me alert and awake and functional and useful.
Read: Bloody Sweet vol 1 (NaRae Lee): A bullied Korean high school student ends up with a vampire servitor who turns out to be an emotional support vampire, to both of their surprise. Probably there will also be some kind of supernatural nonsense.
Written: 285/676/14429.
The most blessed day of the year!
Our new office is not blessed, however, since in the middle of the day, everyone who was there got sent home and the office is closed for the rest of the week. No reason. I asked, but really, no reason. So that’s not worrying at all.
Played: Lancer. This session was all downtime, but we got to level up, and also we fixed our ship and made some kind of contact with one of the groups we’ve been fighting. Brooks’s character is probably going to get eaten by the rogue NHP lurking somewhere across the ocean.
Written: FAIL.
On Mondays I have to stay on call until 19:00, so I can put off starting until 10:00, but it seems like that just discombobulates my schedule without giving me any satisfying rest. It’s like I don’t even know how to be alive.
Written: 391.
I have friends! Somehow. But I am not gaming with them because Dave is still full of germs and Jeremy is slightly under the weather. Not that I have any brilliant ideas for what we should game. I could not even come up with an idea for a 4-hour con game. Perhaps it is time to give up entirely.
Read: Your Favorite Band Cannot Save You (Scotto Moore): A music blogger discovers a band that plays the most amazing music ever. It is straight downhill at ever-increasing speed and weirdness from there.
Read: Unbreakable (Mira Grant): This is not actually Madoka Magica fanfic, but that’s about where it is in terms of genre. The last two surviving magical girls in a world that no longer needs them find out the real story behind the fluffy magical advisors and improbably-named enemies.
Written: 290 words, for 1283 this week and 13753 in nine weeks. Tomorrow is the last week of the challenge.
Written: FAIL. I spent all evening rereading kitten words and being appalled by the inconsistencies and dangling threads.
Watched: Good Omens 2.1: Well, that can’t be good. Hopefully the cute lesbian B-plot will somehow solve everything, because Heaven and Hell are still not particularly competent.
Written: 259.
Obviously not a very important holiday, right?
Back to the office, it was not any better or any worse to have teammates there. We learned about the upcoming release, which will obviously be the best thing ever, ate pasta, and did not die. Commute still okay.
Read: A Half-Built Garden (Ruthanna Emrys): Aliens show up and are all like, “Oh good we got here before your planetary ecosystem collapsed entirely! Come with us if you want to live, which of course you do!” and the anarcho-environmentalist humans are like, “It still needs a little work, but we’re not abandoning our homeworld just because you did.” Negotiation and cultural exchange and internal conflicts ensue. It’s a good solarpunk future, though.
Read: “Compulsory” (Martha Wells): Unsatisfyingly short Murderbot vignette.
Read: “Detonation Boulevard” (Alastair Reynolds): Cyborgs race across Io’s hellscape in nuclear trucks, and capitalism ruins everything.
Read: The Secrets of Insects (Richard Kadrey): Horror short story collection, with a few pieces from the “Sandman Slim” universe, but mostly serial killers/cultists/monsters (not well-delineated categories). Some people get theirs, but it’s almost always the greater of two evils that remains.
Written: 200/734/13204.
Finally went to the new office, completely forgetting there was an all-hands meeting during commute time, so I ended up sitting out back for an hour listening on the phone before finally experiencing the new very small space. I don’t care about not having my own desk, but having too many humans breathing the air is annoying. Lunch delivery is the same.
Overall, the commute is a lot better, because it’s one leg shorter.
Written: 269/534/13004.
Remember when there was more than Google and Amazon and Facebook?
Went to get my teeths cleaned, found out that some fillings had escaped and need to be replaced.
Played: Lancer. Boss fight! We stopped the fiery berserker just before before its reactor exploded and also just before my mech melted into a puddle from all the burn loaded onto it. Not only do we level up, but there’s a promise of information next session.
Written: FAIL.