I tried to do work today, but I was pretty bad at it.
Read: The Black Stone (ed Raffaele Pezzella):Anthology of Mythos stories, some of them okay, some of them fairly bad, none outstanding.
Read: Nemesis of Mars (Glynn Stewart): 13th(?) book of the magic-missiles-in-space series. The hero of the first half of the series gets a chance to go back into the field along with the heroine of the second half (his protege) and is still pretty terrifying, but not unexpectedly so.
Written: 122.
I didn’t get to talk too much in training (or even attend at all) because there were customers all over the place. Probably for the best.
Read: An Immense World (Ed Yong): Ed Yong writes about animal senses and umwelten and it is amazing. Biology is so weird and humans are such a tiny, nonrepresentative sample of it. I didn’t take good notes, but I need to go back and write down a zillion biology facts for the alternate-Friday meeting.
Written: FAIL. Maybe I should just go back to writing kitten words which are fluffy and have no plot and only barely continuity.
I guess I did a work somewhat successfully? Nah, probably not. I’ve never done anything that was actually successful, I’m pretty sure.
Read: MonsTABOO vol 1 (Yuya Takahashi, TALI): Sometimes grownups turn into monsters, most of which are serial killers but some of which just want to be left alone. A middle-school girl whose life was ruined by monsters gets mixed up in all this and takes up with an apparently non-terrible monster. Violence ensues. They better not off Capybara Guy!
Written: FAIL.
Played: Lancer. Finally a fight that isn’t just last-mech-standing! We made it all the way to back of the battlefield before the security system started launching robots at us, and had to keep them off Abrakyl while she rifled the suspicious database, and now we have to escape with her findings. It would probably be working better if I had retreated instead of charging into the stream.
Written: FAIL.
Weekly reminder that you don’t hate Mondays, you hate capitalism. At least on this Monday, I have leftover banana bread and cornbread to raise morale.
Read: Dandadan vol 1 (Yukinobu Tatsu): She believes in spirits but not in UFOs. He believes in UFOs but not spirits. One ill-considered dare later, they’re entangled with weirdly horny examples of each and everything is insane.
Read: The Agartha Loop second ed ch 1.1-1.7 (RavensDagger): So far, much the same as the first edition, but hopefully it won’t stop a little ways into the second loop.
Written: 212 words.
Played: Dark Matter. We’re just trying to walk a couple of miles to take a long rest at the Lawful Good faction’s clubhouse, and so far we’ve had two fights with demons and teamed up with one group of barnyard animals from the Abyss who all have musical numbers. The players got banana bread and singing GMs instead of singing goats in berets.
Read: The Agartha Loop first ed ch 2.1-2.15 (RavensDagger): Apparently this is a discontinued version and there’s a new edition! I guess I’ll go read that.
Written: 235 words.
Managed to get up and look in Marith’s car for my phone and go grocery shopping with my phone, somehow. Then I wobbled around all day until Marith came over for anime and Chinese food.
Watched: My Hero Academia 6.5-6: The fight continues, although it’s moved into a new phase now that the villains have way more damage output.
Read: Colorless vol 1 (KENT): Mysterious solar flare mutated everybody and blasted almost all color from the world, now the mutants are fighting over what color remains and how to use it to rule the world or not. The blurb calls it noir, but it’s really more like Batman.
Read: Namekawa-san Won’t Take a Licking vol 1 (Rie Ato): The title sounds like it could be yuri smut, but really it’s just nonconsensual sliminess. Boo.
Read: Vigor Mortis ch 175-181 (Thundamoo): Now I am caught up. Allegedly there are only twenty or so chapters remaining, which seems plausible. I think the endpoint is probably continental domination.
Read: The Agartha Loop ch 1-35 (RavensDagger): Magical girls with military backup, monsters, parallel universes, time travel, gay romance, and of course time loops. Chapter 35 is where it comes back around to the beginning, so I figured that was a good stopping place for tonight.
Written: FAIL and more FAIL.
Finally it was time to see Jus on stage! It was a very abridged version of The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, but Jus got to be the off-screen voice of the housekeeper and also a skunk in Aslan’s army so she could fight the person she likes. No word on whether she got to drag them off to her lair. Good job, Jus!
When I tried to go to bed, I could not find my phone anywhere. Hopefully it is in Marith’s car and not on the theater floor or something.
Read: Vigor Mortis ch 136-174 (Thundamoo): Continuing transhumanism, mutation, soul editing, extradimensional assholes, super-evil viewpoint characters, super-evil antagonists, etc.
Written: FAIL.
Boo, customer calls. At least this one only lasted a few hours, and was not much interfered with by cleaners.
Read: Vigor Mortis ch 105-135 (Thundamoo): It’s really not surprising that the arc with a breakout from the ultimate-security prison gives us more of Vita’s backstory.
Written: FAIL. There is only read and yawn, no write.
Some kind of city inspectors came by to make sure I have fire alarms and stuff, which was fine, although from the way the apartment manager kept apologizing, I gather a lot of people are not okay with it. The inalienable right to die pointlessly in an escapable fire is enshrined in the Constitution, I guess.
Read: Vigor Mortis ch 44-104 (Thundamoo): More monstrous transformations, monstrous behavior, blasphemy, murder, mind control, religious conversion, political intrigue, etc.
Written: FAIL.
Quarterly review at work. Apparently we have a new system, where when you do the things, you get the points, and if you have enough points at the end of the quarter, you don’t have to go into the crocodile pit. Also I managed to confess that kubernetes is not doing it for me, so somebody more compatible will be given all the cases.
Played: Lancer. I was able to contribute a lot more to the fight once I stop not contributing, and of course we won without being hardly at all destroyed. But all the printers are offline, so we can’t repair much before being sent off to find out who invaded the university and explain the error of their ways.
Written: FAIL.
Boo, Capitalism Monday.
Written: 244 words.
After failing to go grocery shopping yesterday, I managed to do it today, but then sank back into the sludgy depths.
Read: Eyes of the Void (Adrian Tchaikovsky): Sequel to Shards of Earth, in which our characters go to even stranger and more terrifying places, find out more about the problem (not revealed to the reader), and cannot get away from each other. Since the whole series has been about of the mystery of why the world-destroying monsters destroy worlds, I hope we get to find it out pretty soon.
Read: “How I Stole the Princess’s White Knight and Turned Him To Villainy: Miracle 2” (AJ Sherwood): We get to meet the evil sorcerer’s siblings, who are just as wacky, but the monster does not get a speaking role.
Read: Vigor Mortis ch 1-43 (Thundamoo): As expected, a story about a probably-neurodivergent girl turning into a monster and doing murders. This one is street rat in a secondary world who is becoming some kind of soul-hacker and zombie queen. This may constitute stealing souls from God. There are a lot of murders and mind control and puberty and other traumatic events.
Written: FAIL.
I didn’t accomplish anything today, but I did visit friends and search for the lost art of conversation and eat cheese fondue, salad, chocolate fondue, and German chocolate cake and get hugs and play Goose Goose Duck. I’m pretty sure the conversations other people had while I was playing video games with kids were better than the ones I had, but I got some good book recommendations. It was a nice evening, and now that we’ve had fondue, it can officially be 2023.
Written: FAIL.
Spent almost the entire day and then some on a customer call. I hear they got things working after I left.
Marith came over to watch anime and eat Cheese Disk, which used up all the rest of my brain.
Watched: My Hero Academia 6.3-4: Yep, this fight (to be fair, it’s on two fronts so far and may expand) is going to take up the whole season, isn’t it?
Read: The Drowned Lands (Benjamin Sperduto): Adventure in the doomed post-apocalyptic age between Cthulhu destroying civilization and reshaping the Earth’s surface and him actually waking up. Cultists and rain everywhere, magical artifacts, theocracy, inevitable doom.
Read: The Atlas of the Latter Earth (Kevin Crawford): The default setting for Worlds Without Number, in a fair amount of detail. It seems like too much detail to me, but it’s not like I don’t know the urge to keep creating, and many of the bits are pretty good. Also it’s for OSR, so I guess detail is expected?
Read: The Path of Duty (Eric Thomson): Second in a missiles-in-space series with very old-fashioned space navy and unending corruption which is the real enemy. It’s clear the invading aliens would not be a problem if humanity could get anything together to fight them instead of treating the entire war as a profiteering opportunity.
Written: FAIL.
Do I talk too much in meetings? Probably. Things are almost always better when I shut up.
Read: “Ashen Stars” (Glynn Stewart): Prequel to the “Exile” series, where the main character first comes to understand that the military dictatorship he’s slated to inherit really is that bad.
Written: 154.
Not so many meetings today. Not so much gaming, either.
Read: World War Cthulhu (ed Brian M Sammons, Glynn Owen Barrass): Encounters with the Mythos in time of war, or at least by soldiers. Troy, Vietnam, American Revolution, Cold War, some wars yet to come, but no Gulf War or Afghanistan, by which I conclude that the authors are not just mostly white guys, but old white guys. I guess that’s thematically fitting for Lovecraft. One good thing about wars (well, not the Trojan War) is that they have lots of explosives, which as we know is the best way to take out monsters, but many of the protagonists come to sticky ends.
Read: “Haley and the Town of Refuge” (MCA Hogarth): Series finale, even more theologically-inclined than the previous installments because the very Christian protagonist has to make a weighty decision. Everyone continues to be well-intentioned and full of good food, though.
Read: “Coffee, Milk & Spider Silk” (Coyote JM Edwards): In a town full of fantasy races, but with modern Internet service, a drider cop retires to open a coffee shop and faces non-fantastic problems like trying to get people to come drink her coffee, difficult baristas, and a lack of talent for latte art. No idea whether this was written before or after Legends & Lattes.
Written: 147.
So many meetings, starting actually before sunrise. Ugh. Ugh. Ugh.
Played: Lancer. Back at base and doing downtime activities after the last mission, the PCs are suddenly assaulted by random mechs! Or at least the university (“university” to Abrakyl and Shoutao, who mock their excessive use of IRBs) is assaulted and the PCs are the only ones with mechs handy. I tried to do the teamwork thing of staying by the defender mech that can protect me with its memes, but this seems to be a losing proposition without ranged attacks.
Read: Rodeo Clown chapter 11 (Marith): At long last, the climactic battle between evil and other, more shippable, evil!
Written: FAIL.
“Weekly reminder that you don’t hate Mondays, you hate capitalism.”
Read: The Bloodship Returns (Dirk Leichty): “ALL THE ROCKET KINGDOMS believed the vampires forever fallen, ALL memory of their galactic imperium lost to legend… But from darkest night it drifted: the Bloodship, thirsty, carving a path of carnage toward desolate Mars, the abandoned seat of lost dominion. And you among the unlucky captives trawled into the ship’s sloshing bowel…” A minimal system and a lot of brightly-colored maps and strange illustrations for crawling through the Bloodship. The visuals hurt my neurons, but the sketches of worldbuilding are intriguing.
Written: 126 words, which is kind of like more than 100, but not really.
Managed to do a grand total of zero things today.
Read: Dead Tired vol 1 (RavensDagger): A lich, having exhausted the possibilities of vivisecting gods and plumbing the deep structure of his litRPG universe, goes into hibernation to wait for something interesting to happen and is rudely awakened to find that the genre has changed to cultivation fantasy and he does not approve. The viewpoint character is thus mostly terrible puns and trampling over everything in his way, but he rapidly accumulates a retinue of more interesting yet equally ridiculous characters.
Written: Fail fail faillity fail.
I made it to grocery shopping, but that’s about it.
Read: Bioshifter ch 34-45 (Thundamoo): Switched to reading on Patreon, now I’m really completely caught up. Hannah is still a complete mess internally, but that is not stopping her from being terrifying and getting things done. Possibly these things are hastening the destruction of two or more universes, though.
Read: The Two of Them Are Pretty Much Like This vol 1 (Takashi Ikeda): Slice of life of an adult lesbian couple. Very chill, mostly about their home life and not much about working in the anime industry (one is a voice actress, one is a scriptwriter).
Written: 180 words. Meh.
Pocket frond got me a good fact about the horrors of the deep to use in the fortnightly meeting (dolphins use pufferfish to get high). I had some more facts, which I have now forgotten so I better find them and write them down.
Marith somehow did not murder her entire management chain, so she was not in jail and could come over to eat Cheese Disk and watch anime.
Watched: My Hero Academia smiling graffiti artist and then the first two episodes of season six. Marith complained a lot about their bad tactics, which was mostly pretty legit, although I think in many cases there were reasons for doing it the way they did (like, not being actual military).
Read: Bioshifter ch 16-33 (Thundamoo): More mutation and murder and trauma and bad religion and secrets and cute girls and trauma. This is as much as has been posted on Royal Road, so I was able to stop reading and die in a pit for now.
Written: FAIL. I just really kind of suck at this whole “writing” thing.
Read: Bioshifter ch 8-15 (Thundamoo): This MC is having a really rough time of it, but it’s all fascinating. And doomed, on several levels, but mostly fascinating. I wonder what the end state will be (other than alienating all her friends).
Written: 193 words, but I think I’m not making my own MC suffer enough. Maybe I need to start this part over, again.
Read: Hive Minds Give Good Hugs ch 42-53 (ThundaMoo): Wow, it actually concluded instead of running for ten thousand episodes, and wrapped up and everything. That was pretty swell, although full of doom and anxiety and moral dilemmas and planetary [SPOILER].
Read: Bioshifter ch 1-7 (Thundamoo) : Started the next story, which is not related but also has anxiety and transformations and gayness an d mystery. No amnesia, though.
Written: 185 words.
Back to work. At least Friday is closer than it may appear in mirror.
Played: Lancer. We finished the battle against the migrating radioactive robots, and then handwaved the many fights we were going to have to have against all the other people in the Triangle before we could persuade them that downloading illegal technology from the omninet is a bad idea even if you’re then going to take it to an unaligned world before experimenting with it. Level UP.
Written: FAIL.
Why has MLK’s ghost not eaten all the Republicans and centrists? It’s like we live in an uncaring material universe or something.
While pondering this important question, I went grocery shopping and then um nothing.
Written: 276, which is more than 250. I think?
I stayed up an hour less, and thus got up an hour earlier. Funny how that works. I also left the apartment during daylight hours, which is always good for the brain chemicals. And yet, still useless!
Written: 242 words, which is almost my daily quota. But not quite.
It was not, in fact, okay that I stayed up until 2:00. But if I have to completely waste a day, at least this is a good day for it.
In the evening, Marith came over and we (re)watched the last episode of My Hero Academia S5, and the ridiculous baseball OVA, and ate some balsamic chicken stuff. It was like human contact, at least more so than playing Slay the Spire for 873 hours in a row.
Written: 328 words.
It’s Friday the 13th and yet I have no black cats! But I have teeth and electricity and Internets, so I guess it’s okay.
Today I finally started playing Slay the Spire, after Ken recommended it ages ago and I bought it for iPad one age ago. It’s a deck-building rogue-like, which combines two things I like but am bad at, so it should be no surprise that it’s addictive and I’m completely terrible at it.
I checked that the grocery store is open on Monday, so I don’t need to go shopping tomorrow, which makes it completely okay to stay up until midnight 1:00 2:00, right?
Written: 193 words.
Took the afternoon off for dentistry, which turned out to be more dentistry than I had remembered, but now I have a shiny new crown for chomping.
Read: Family Ties (BR Kingsolver): This reminded me of the Amber books a little, interdimensional family intrigue with magic and extensive murders, in a matter-of-fact tone. It is more generic fantasy, though, with elves and goblins and pretty generic magic.
Read: Trolled (Lindsay Buroker): Also dwarves and elves and orcs, but in modern Seattle. Third book of the series and the protagonist is definitely falling hard for the guy she has extremely valid reasons to not trust, even though he hasn’t betrayed her yet and also is a good kisser.
Read: The Scarab Mission (James L Cambias): Set in the same far-future, slightly Orion’s Arm-inspired, solar system as The Godel Operation (which I inexplicably failed to record reading, probably because it was over the holidays and I am very stupid), with one overlapping character. This is more like survival horror than action-adventure, scavengers on a dead hab that might not be entirely empty.
Written: 124 words. I count anything above 100 as “not zero”, so…