Author: Trip the Space Parasite

I got up and almost went grocery shopping, but then went back to bed instead. Social Minecraft is today because Nonny and everybody are busy tomorrow, so I can shop then.

This week, I explored the desert some more. It turns out to have two rivers, which may explain why I couldn’t find the riverside cave I found earlier. It also has at least two wells, which are pretty but mostly useless since thirst is not a thing, a bunch of cactus, and some suspiciously rectangular skylines that are not desert temples. I bought some custom banners from Nonny’s banner shop,which now has a colored sheep breeding program as part of its supply chain. After we finished, I went to my own world and finally found two cows to lead back to my paddock. Once my wheat crop comes in, I can make them smooch adorably and spawn new cows, and finally I will have a steady supply of leather for books.

I was on call all afternoon, but the customers were quiescent.

Read: Renegades (Craig Alanson): Immediately upon returning from their last expedition, the PCs have to steal their ship back from duly-constituted authority and set out to save Earth by doing the impossible. Again.

Written: 152. If only two points were enough to draw a line…

Marith is still dead from impending travel, so no anime this week either.

I tried to explore overland, but kept getting distracted by caves. It’s not like I have any shortage of minerals, but I keep looking anyway.

Read: The Idaten Deities Know Only Peace vol 1 (Amahara, coolkyousinnjya): Sure, the major characters don’t care about what individual humans do to each other, but there was no need to cut to a graphic rape scene to prove the point.

Read: Lords of Uncreation (Adrian Tchaikovsky): Conclusion to the trilogy, in which our heroes manage to do the thing despite everyone around them trying to do the other thing, or maybe ignore the question by having a war they understand instead of screwing around with the fundamental nature of the universe. It is pretty tense even though things are mostly as the reader would expect, and the Divine Essiel are still great aliens.

Written: 262 words over the past however long, but 101 of them were tonight, so apparently I can write 100 words a day without dying. Unimpressive as that may be.

More office, this time Chinese food in honor of AAPI Month. I wasn’t a complete idiot in the technical meeting, so yay? I managed to both commute without delay and pick up my prescription on the way home, so I think I’m pretty much sold on this routine even if sometimes transit betrays me cruelly.

Usually I keep my computing devices quiet unless I have explicitly asked for a noise, but I finally tried turning the sound on while playing Minecraft and it was okay. Knowing monsters are around doesn’t seem to help me avoid them, and hearing distant zmobies while digging through the dark rock of the moderate depths was more creepy than useful in any case. I got no diamonds but a lot of redstone, and also found clay while boating around on my way back. Plus, I now have a paddock for cows, and a wheat field that will eventually give me the materials to lure them into my paddock and force them to reproduce. Bookcases, here I come!

Written: FAIL.

 

 

 

Office, bleah, but I managed to successfully commute in the afternoon after eating Togo’s sandwiches.

I kept digging for diamonds, but found everything else, including an amethyst geode. I don’t think amethyst blocks or shards are useful for much, but they’re very pretty. I’ll have to go back later and see if the crystals have regrown. (I know they regrow, I don’t know how long it takes.)

Kindle has taken to choking on epubs I get from Kobo, so I guess I’m switching to the Kobo app for reading (except Kindle Unlimited). Probably for the best, but annoying.

Read: Mavericks (Craig Alanson): Sixth or so in the series, this time mostly a cut to another group of humans making their way in the hostile universe while the series MC and his glowing beer can are waiting out a problem. Even the aliens that have engineered themselves to be genetically superior are pretty dumb.

Read: Season of Skulls (Charles Stross): Further adventures of the former henchwoman of a Bond villain in the dark future of Britain under Nyarlathotep, as she keeps trying to disentangle herself from his plans after murdering him a book or two previously. Most of the Laundry books put the characters into another genre to make them suffer more, and this one is Regency romance but meta and with more necromancy.

Written: FAIL.

Early meeting, ugh. Not as early as some, and not requiring any input from me, but still ugh.

We almost had gaming, but then Ken had some kind of child-shaped emergency so instead I played Minecraft. This time I did remember to put my travel bed near where I was mining, although I didn’t get killed much because I was in the mine tunnels I dug, not monster-infested caves.At -50, I was hoping to find diamonds, but instead found mostly redstone and some lapis and gold and iron.

Read: The Beacon at Barrington Light (Mike Watson): Space mystery that turns out to not be very mysterious or interesting.

Writing: FAIL.

There’s no gaming, because Rachel is having Mother’s Day instead, so I was able to go grocery shopping and get a lunch and play Minecraft with Nonny and everyone (albeit remotely). I spent most of the session running around a desert (normal sand, so weird after the badlands of my primary world!) and exploring caves along the riverbank, but I was able to mine stuff so I can buy banners from Nonny and Ayse’s Banner Shop.

After we had to knock off group Minecraft, I splooted around in my own world (er, my copy of Marith’s world) and moved my sugarcane farming from the edges of the Dye Gardens (where stalks fall into the zmobie soup ocean) to the top of the mesa. I had to haul water up in buckets for it, but I don’t think it ended up being 52 buckets, which is nice.

Written: FAIL.

I was on call from 7 to 19 o’clock, because capitalism, but the customers were pretty quite so I was able to sleep in next to my phone, and also visit Ayse & fam for Eurovision 2023. Earl and Cat also put in an appearance and we ate bread and roe and borscht and pelmeni and watched ridiculous stage performances and had a good time. I didn’t like the songs as much this year; I remembered some of the spectacle, but little of the music. However, agreement was universal that Finland was robbed.

Because there were technical difficulties, it took a lot longer to get to the replay of the finals, so we spent some time watching the first semi and part of the second, and didn’t finish until well into the evening, but it’s not like I had a better use for the day.

Marith was not there because she is dead in anticipation of an upcoming trip with her abusive mother.

Written: FAIL.

Back to the office again, only sandwiches this time. Also I didn’t manage to hide in a conference so I had to wear my mask a lot, but I tried going home in the middle of the afternoon and logging back on, and this time it worked pretty well.

Read: Forging Hephaestus (Drew Hayes): A small-time superpowered thief gets drafted for the villain’s guild and assigned to a retired high-level villain. The guild minimizes conflict with superheroes by having a few rules, and even fewer penalties for breaking them. Shenanigans, crime, and betrayal ensue.

Read: A Kiss of Light and Flame (M Owens): Described as a yuri light novel, and extremely light. One antagonist, no plot twists, but there are two girls who fall in love.

Written: FAIL.

Boo, commute. We had the good chicken tikka masala naan burritos for lunch, at least, and after I retreated to a conference room to eat, I forgot to come out, so that was slightly less unpleasant than many office experiences even if probably less polite.  Also I remembered to grab a burrito for dinner tomorrow, although I didn’t have a way to transport the tasty tamarind sauce.

On the upside, I finally found blue flowers for my Dye Garden! They were in fact just past the cave I died horribly in yesterday, and just before the cave I died horribly in today.

Written: FAIL.

Played: Lancer. This time, our victory condition was to get to the far end of the map, past the annoying enemy mechs, and rescue the civilians. Alas, Vivian had to drop right at the beginning, so we weren’t able to cheese it with teleports, and it turned out to be a lot harder than last session, or at least a lot more painful. We didn’t even get to tick a clock!

Instead of going to bed, I searched Minecraft for blue flowers, but found only  caves full of coal and copper and DEATH.

Read: Komi Can’t Communicate vol 24 (Tomohito Oda): Well, now they’re an item, but they don’t seem to know what to do except be even more awkward. All the other characters are way too invested in the ship.

Read: Somebunny to Love (Zoe Chant): Latest of Kit’s “Virtue Shifter” novellas (?), in which a rabbit shifter finds her fated mate and bangs his brains out, and nothing even slightly bad happens at any point.

Written: FAIL.

Did I do anything today? Probably not.

Read: Tista vol 1 (Tatsuya Endo): She’s an orphan with an inherited eye. They’re the Roman Catholic Church. Together, they shoot evil people in modern New York City. I picked this up because it’s by the same mangaka as SpyxFamily, but it’s gritty and angsty about its bloodshed and just not much fun. Also I think they must be printing manga smaller these days, because obviously my eyes can’t be getting worse.

Read: A Dark and Dirty War (Eric Thomson): Eighth book, well after the war when our heroine is about to get turfed out of the space navy for having found too many opportunities for improvement of tactical doctrine, lots of space and lots of humans who deserve murder, but almost no actual missiles or free-floating humans in the space.

Written: Back to FAIL.

Today I lay abed for most of the morning, but then played huge amounts of Minecraft. Despite the risk of horrible death germs, I went over to Monkeycats’ and we played in Nonny’s world all afternoon. I tried to do some mapping, but succeeded only in messing up Ayse’s giant map, so maybe I’ll stick to wandering aimlessly and mining things. Also Jus and Nonny opened their shops, bringing capitalism to the world of one-meter cubes, and we had a bonfire party. Then after a dinner of Ken’s Famous Turkey Chili, Nonny and I played in a copy of my world, and explored the alien landscape at the bottom of the big cave near spawn. It was blue and glittery and we never saw the actual ancient city, but the Warden saw us. Briefly.

Read: The Invisible Man & His Soon-to-Be Wife vol 1 (Iwatobineko): She’s blind. He’s invisible. Together, they work at a detective agency and flirt adorably.

Written: 207.

D’oh, I forgot to pay rent. Fortunately the apartment manager is chill.

Ran three separate errands, and also finally built a lava factory in my great hall. It took longer than it should have, because I kept getting distracted by caves full of gold and death, and then I lost a bucket when it popped free, fell into the lava, and was destroyed, but finally I had two lavas for the Dual-Column Lavamatic! (What do you mean, “what is it good for?”? It’s a lava-making machine!)

Written: Still FAIL.

Yay WFH. Yay salad instead of weird health burritos. Yay shorts.

I played a lot of Minecraft because I’m not very clever. I found red flowers, and then kept going until I pillaged the mountain range of mineral wealth, and made it back home without dying, but didn’t find any blue flowers. Still, I have enough iron to keep me in shears for a while, and as much red dye as I can get bonemeal to generate, and also I learned the water out front of my great hall is only an inlet, not a channel between islands. That’s got to count for something.

Written: FAIL.

Back to the office yet again. This week’s weather isn’t so bad, despite my whining. Also it’s been a fairly quiet week on the customer front, at least compared to the past couple.

Trundled around in Minecraft getting murdered by zmobies.

Read: The Slaughtered Lamb Bookstore & Bar (Seana Kelly): She’s a werewolf who survived a serial killer and now runs a bar and bookstore for San Francisco’s secret supernatural community, he’s a hot and surprisingly nice vampire. Together they fight crime, and are kind of adorkable, and also kick ass. There’s a lot of plot and violence, but also a HFN (I assume, based on the existence of multiple sequels) so is it PNR? I dunno how genres work.

Read: By A Silver Thread (Rachel Aaron): Set in the same magic/cyberpunk future as the dragon books, this time our MC is a fae changeling in thrall to a blood mage. It goes downhill from there, in ways that revolve around the nature of fae in this setting. There is a kissing subplot, but it’s definitely not a romance book.

Written: FAIL.

Back to the office, despite Coworker L, who was there last week, being down with Covid and HR sending out a notification and everything. At least the trains are back to normal this week, although that doesn’t necessarily help when the busses are late.

Grass successfully spread into my dye gardens, so I was able to create some additional dye. Still need to find red and blue flowers, though. With red, blue, yellow, white, and light grey, I can get every color of dye except black. That still requires hunting squid, since I’ve never seen a “wither rose”.

Written: FAIL.

My plan for beautiful floating dye gardens foundered on three reefs of hubris and poor design:

  • 2-height flowers don’t make more flowers when hit with bone meal, they just drop a copy of themselves. This is convenient, because it means I can convert bone meal directly to dye, but I only need one flower, not a garden.
  • Cactus can apparently only be planted on white sand? That’s weird, since it grows on red sand in the wild, but whatever. The problem here is that a block of cactus drops less than one cactus object on average, so I need to leave a stump to keep growing, but then I take damage trying to pick up the drops. Maybe I can do something with fences?
  • Most tragic of all, 1-height flowers don’t produce new flowers on regular dirt blocks, only grass blocks, which are almost impossible to get directly since you either need a shovel with a specific enchantment or have to mug an enderman who’s carrying one. However, grass does spread to adjacent blocks, so maybe making trails of dirt from existing grass to the gardens will populate them with

Played: Lancer. Since this is a module, we had a fancy map for our first mech fight, and special rules and victory conditions and everything! We also had about 3 license levels extra, so we triumphed OK even without Kelsey’s character on our side, and double reinforcements on the other.

Written: FAIL.

 

Surprisingly quiet day at work, especially after last week’s craziness. Maybe it will continue, but I’m not counting on it.

Today in Minecraft I befriended an ocelot, built a composter to turn foliage into white dye, rebuilt my inter-island causeway, delved deep into the cave it leads to, mined some lapis lazuli and a huge pile of copper, and used the lapis as blue dye to complete my set of all sixteen colors of glazed terracotta. Unfortunately, having more options is not making it easier to pick the ones I want. Maybe I should tile one of the side halls in compressed raw copper, which I will be able to do after finding one or two more big copper deposits.

Read: Azarinth Healer vol 2 (Rhaegar): Main character keeps wandering around doing whatever she feels like as long it involves violence or hedonism. This time she joins a high-level guild to get more opportunities for violence, hires a master chef to fill her inventory slots with gourmet food for later, invades another dimension, fights off an invasion from another dimension, and makes some friends.

Written: FAIL.

Played: Dark Matter. Getting to the dragon’s lair required the PCs to blow up a trash compactor full of gummy worms and fight robot duplicates of each other, but I was totally right about which surprisingly powerful NPC was really the dragon and of course they were on board with defeating the space mold kraken. Now we really have to break into the Abyss, rescue the mutated space hamsters, and finish the plot arc in triumph. After that, who knows what we’ll play.

I spent a lot more time playing Minecraft after that. Finally tried fishing, got some fish and a book of enchantments, built an orange terracotta causeway across to the spawn island with the big cave, dug down in the cave to find a bunch of coal and copper and a little island, finished up the side hall that opened into a cave and put up the rest of the hovering lights, got eaten by zmobies, hunted a squid for ink sacs to make black terracotta, the usual.

Written: Still FAIL. I can actually think about what happens next, at least a few paragraphs, but it never goes into a keyboard.

 

It’s the walk-a-thon at Nonny’s school, so I went to enjoy the breeze and hang out with people and eat a decent veggie burger and walk around a track. Then, since I was already way down that way and crossing the expressway to take the bus toward home would be a pain, I went to the Trader Joe’s that is dangerously near the Barnes and Noble and had a bookstore accident. It’s only once a year!

When I got home, I worked more on my grand orange terracotta hall, and also went looking for iron so I could make a pickaxe to mine out the gold ore cluttering up my side hall. It turned out the iron I thought I saw before was actually more gold, but eventually I found a cave that went down and down to where it had a little iron. It also had lapis and gold, so I need to go back at some point.

Watched: Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress 10-12 and movie 1: Finished the series, which ended about as well as could be reasonably expected, and then let autoplay roll over into the compilation movie to remind myself of the early stuff. It was about 30% shorter than a rewatch of the episodes.

Written: FAIL.

Of course, not going into the office at all is the best, even when there’s a meeting first thing.

Watched: RWBY 9.2-4: Yep, very Wonderland. The cat is kind of alarming.

I stayed up past midnight playing Minecraft, which caused my eyes to turn into little spirals. I got two side halls in my grand orange terracotta hall dug, and most of a third (except for the random lump of gold ore that I can’t mine because I have no iron), explored some caves of dripstone and death, respawned on the steep slope of plummeting and zmobies several times, maybe saw some iron ore before getting exploded by a creeper, and finally hunted a third sheep so I could make a bed to respawn at home. When I put it that way, it was a lot of Minecraft!

Written: No writing, only video games.

Instead of waiting until the usual quitting time to start commuting home, I commuted back in the middle of the afternoon. I felt obligated to work later after that, but at 18:30 I was home, in comfortable clothes, hydrated, and full of ice cream health, which is better in every way than 18:30 yesterday.

Because I took it into my head to make a great hall of red sand and/or orange terracotta (not actually red sandstone), I spent most of the evening digging and making stone pickaxes and digging some more. Eventually I decided the main hall was grand enough, so now I know how large to make the side halls for proper symmetry.

Written: Still FAIL.

Trains still weird this week, which is inconvenient, but I’m in favor of electrification. Renewable renewable OK!

The office is still uncomfortable and annoying, even though they gave us sandwiches. My masking is definitely slipping. 🙁

Read: Fog of War (JN Chaney, Terry Mixon): I think the authors just like writing about this new character, because although he’s given a lot of important exposition, he didn’t need to take up that much of two books. But it’s always good to have additional doom placed on the mantel.

Written: FAIL. I didn’t even manage to waste time on anything specific, I just got home and ate a dinner and then suddenly the day was over.

Managed to fix an upset customer, whose problem was not what they originally thought. Let’s hear it for the Knowledge Base!

Played: Now Ken is running Lancer, because somehow he still likes it. We’re using a module, which might be a bit weird because we’re three levels in and have our own spaceship, but I’m sure it will all work out. Somehow. Even though we’re stuck on a planet that’s full of replicant military hardware and/or monsters.

Written: FAIL.

Early morning all-hands, but at least it wasn’t about the company going under or additional layoffs. Things are allegedly getting better, although of course the rest of us still get punished for Sales’ deficiencies.

I finally got around to investigating the giant cave right near the spawn point in Ayse’s world, and found assorted ores and a lot of strange monsters that murderized me. Also an underground garden with glowberries and azaleas and moss blocks.

Read: Prodigal (Glynn Stewart): Sixth and last of the series about a space fighter pilot who got driven into exile by her government’s betrayal, but now returns with all the resources and allies she has accumulated to set things right.

Written: FAIL.

It is also the birthday of my slack friend who loves manuls the most, so clearly she wins at life.

I can’t get up in the morning to write, but I can get up to slog all the way up to Mountain View for the blood draws I’ve been putting off. You’d think that would be much more work, but it’s a simple task with no cognitive requirements and a real scheduling requirement. (Later it turned out the busses were all messed up and I did have to think about what to do, and also walk, but it started out easy.) By the time I got back to San Jose, it was apparently church time, because I was able to get seated for brunch immediately. I almost certainly should not have eaten any of that, but it was really good.

Then I got home and it was all Minecraft all the time. Nonny is sick, so it was remote Minecraft, but I found a secret ravine behind a mountain that had piles of coal, and then a cave with more coal. I also got lost a lot, and missed out on seeing the amethyst geode, but that’s okay. There will be be more Minecraft parties. When everybody else was done, I made worlds based on the RNG seeds of Marith’s world with red sand and a mesa and a huge dripstone cave, and Ayse’s world with giant holes everywhere. I haven’t done much hole exploring, but I have a jungle house and a great hatred of bamboo.

Read: Chosen of Chaos (Benjamin Medrano): It’s like a cross between Dark Matter (dragons and wizards in space) and Tenchi Muyo (some individuals are as powerful as entire fleets of ships). There are almost no male characters, but the MC is so OP (in combat, in finance, in bed…) that she never faces any challenge whatsoever.

Written: 238 words, which is not much for a week. Maybe two weeks.

Yay, no commuting! Lots of customers, but whatever. I did at least as much work as I would have in the office, so bite me, capitalists.

Also I can have cleaners in when I’m not at the office, so my apartment is slightly less squalid.

Watched: My Hero Academia 6.24-25: Uraraka finally got to do something, even if it was only make a speech, and now the team is back together. Apparently the next season will consist of a single scene that takes 25 episodes.

Watched: RWBY 9.1: Well, that’s better than what it looked like was going to happen at the end of season 8. Maybe. Also, brightly colored!

Read: Zero Hour (Craig Alanson): Even more shenanigans, but Skippy’s quest has advanced by one milestone. Also everybody is even more doomed than they were before they tried to fix things.

Read: Trouble on Paradise (Craig Alanson): Side characters from book three get into extra trouble, but the explosions don’t damage human-alien relations. Much.

Written: FAIL.