Author: Trip the Space Parasite

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.

 

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.

Why am I not a tiger? What am I doing wrong?

I went grocery shopping and stuff, which I don’t think tigers do, and then I laid around the rest of the day, which is a step in the right direction.

Read: The Hungry Dreaming (Craig Schaefer): An intrepid reporter, her steadfast partner, and a teenaged runaway get tangled up in the secret history of New York dating back to the Revolutionary War. Despite the investigation and existential dread, it’s not Lovecraftian at all, but I was wondering for a while there. Apparently the start of a series, although I’m not sure where it can go from here.

Read: “That One Night” (Emily Rath): Straight-up one-night-stand smut, although apparently the prologue to another book or series. I dunno, choking still seems weird to me. Shows what I know about sex, I guess.

Written: 266, 1250 for the week, 12339 overall. No weird sex stuff.

“Cut down, not across.” (Like anyone remembers alt.sysadmin.recovery these days.)

Usually I don’t get much grief from vaccine side-effects, but the old-person vaccines I had to get yesterday are more obnoxious than most. Still better than either shingles or pneumonia, I’m pretty sure.

Even had I been minded to, I couldn’t have reasonably taken the day off sick since two people were out and one called in sick, but whatever. Fatigue and headache build character, right?

The high point of the day was definitely going with Marith to see Barbie. That was really quite something, even if I’m just Ken. (Actually, people said I have Allan energy, so :shrug emoji:.) Apparently some of the thing it was is Innana’s journey to the Underworld, so that’s awesome.

Written: FAIL.

No confirmation from the office that we have valid Internet, so we’re all WFH today. This turned out a little annoying for me, as I had to go to my afternoon doctor appointment in Mountain View from way down in San Jose, instead of from just down the street, but hey, if the company can’t be arsed to get network working before trying to make people go in to the office…

Now I have many referrals to specialists which this time I will definitely follow up on and not ignore for months on end, right? Right?

Written: 170/984/12073.

I did not go into the office because I have to be available until 19:00 which makes commuting a pain, so I missed the office-opening brunch but also missed going all the way to Mountain View only to find that the network is rubbish.

Read: No Matter What You Say, Furi-San Is Scary! vol 4 (Seiichi Kinoue): Furi-san is just not that scary any more, so it’s become a pretty generic high-school romance manga.

Read: The Ancient Magus’ Bride: Jack Flash and the Faerie Case Files vol 1 (Yu Godai, Mako Oikawa, Kore Yamazaki): Another spin-off, this one about a fae detective and her werewolf brother in New York. I don’t know if the author doesn’t understand American prices, or if they’re supposed to be grossly underpaid, but yikes.

Written: 198/814/11903.

But I don’t want to get up.

Played: Nothing, Ken’s household is full of plague and woe.

Read: She Loves To Cook, and She Loves To Eat vol 1 (Sakaomi Yuzaki): What it says on the tin! A lady who likes to cook but lives by herself and has no one to eat her cooking notices that the lady down the hall has a huge appetite. A beautiful friendship ensues, and might become something more. Do not read this when you are hungry, though.

Read: “After the Animal Flesh Beings” (Brian Evenson): The robots that survive humanity have their own problems. It is not a happy story.

Written: 616 for the day and week, 11705 overall.

Played: Dark Matter. However, after leveling up to level 7, for all the good it did us, we finished the campaign! Space hamsters were saved from the Abyss, the guardians of the threshold were able to retire, etc. Not sure what we’re going to do now, but we have two whole weeks to think about it. Is everything I run terrible? Yes. Am I likely to end up running anyway? Probably.

Read: Karen From HR ch1-8 (Unpretty): Batman fanfic about an employee of WayneCorp, who has a hard and unusual life and then meets Bruce Wayne in person so things go sharply downhill. Kind of harrowing, but also Corinne is great for some extremely dark comedic value of “great”.

Written: 295 today, 1542/1000 for the week, 11089/10000 overall.

American date style is stupid.

Cleaners came early in the morning, so I was up to go grocery shopping before being on call all afternoon. There were some customers, and a lot of uselessness. I tried to take a nap, but didn’t do a very good job.

Read: The Accidental Summoning (Kos Play): Teenage boy discovers the secret LitRPG world somehow hiding behind modern life, tries to summon a magic teacher and ends up with a cute teenaged girl, learns that his magic is the Forbidden Ultimate Power, etc. Except for being set in the US and a book, it would be a cheesy shōnen anime.

Written: 253/1247/10794. Not sure this is going anywhere useful, though.

I have nothing against Australian lemon-choco cakes, but probably wouldn’t have picked this for my header if Coworker T hadn’t used it for his fact in the meeting today. (My fact was about turtle butts.)

Watched: Murder Drones 4-5: Still pretty ???, but then YouTube rolled over to somebody explaining his theory of what happened, and it seemed pretty plausible. No idea whether it’s correct.

Written: 181 today, 994 for the week, 10541 overall.

Finally signed up for BigBadCon and booked a hotel room and put in the vacation request for work and stuff. Now I just have to die in a pit come up with something to run. Or admit that I can’t GM worth beans.

Read: MonsTABOO vol 3 (Yuya Takahashi, TALI): After the tragic events of vol 2, our MC is back not just for revenge but to expose and tear down the whole rotten edifice of monster bloodsport.

Read: The Executioner and Her Way of Life vol 1 (Mato Sato, Ryo Mitsuya, nilitsu): People from other worlds always end up causing catastrophes with their isekai powers, so the church has special assassins to bump them off as soon as they arrive. This new girl is too powerful to just shank, though, so the assassin has to travel back to headquarters with her, which will certainly not awaken any feelings in her cold black heart.

Written: 156/813/10360.

We have no office this week, so I don’t have to commute! Being at home is a lot more comfortable. It’s not even too hot.

Despite the lack of commute, I somehow left the apartment anyway. Not sure I approve of the outside world.

Read: The Detective is Already Dead vol 1-2 (mugiko, nigozyu, Umibouzu): The trouble-magnet teenaged sidekick of a monster-hunting detective thought he could return to a comparatively normal life a year after the detective’s death, but no, there’s another mystery, and another after that.

Written: 261 today, 657 this week, and 10204/10000 overall. Let’s see if I have any motivation for the remaining 3½ weeks.

7:30 meeting, ugh. However, it’s less hot, so that’s something?

Played: Nothing, Ken has too much work and Kelsey has too little stable employment.

Read: There’s No Freaking Way I’ll Be Your Lover! Unless… vol 1 (Musshu, Teren Mikami, Eku Takeshima): She wants to be best friends. She wants to be girlfriends. Whose view of the ideal relationship will prevail? And what about that really cute girl with the soft hands?

Read: The Two of Them Are Pretty Much Like This vol 2 (Takashi Ikeda): More grownup lesbian slice of life. Not a lot happens, but the main characters are good with that.

Read: Daemons of the Shadow Realm vol 1 (Hiromu Arakawa): New series from the creator of FMA. Not sure about it yet, but that’s quite a genre shift in the first volume.

Written: 215/396/9943. I think I recovered from forgetting my MC’s tragic backstory, mostly. Feelings are still the worst, though.

On call in the afternoon, but hardly any customers came to annoy me, so I was able to be very bad at Minecraft. I’m sorry, bees! I didn’t mean to kill you all through my incompetence! But I did eventually succeed in harvesting some honeycomb to make beehives, for when I figure out how to get bees to my farm. (It’s too far to lead them with flowers, so I think I’ll have to enchant a Silk Touch axe to steal the whole nest.) Also I found a hole in the ocean, which is pretty impressive but didn’t have anything special at the bottom.

Read: Nimona (Noelle Stevenson): I still want to throw all my material belongings into the sea, but I haven’t yet which means I was able to dig up my copy of the Nimona GN from like eight years ago. It’s different in many ways from the movie, but still the same story, which is pretty good adaptation. Or maybe Nimona is just that strong of a character.

Watched: Estab Life 5-6. For an episode that was all about underwear, that wasn’t actually that much fanservice. It’s also impressive how four people on a five-person team can all have both Cha and Wis as dump stats.

Written: 209/1377/9386.

Fortunately we did not have beans ‘n’ franks for office lunch. We did have sandwiches, but there wasn’t even cake to celebrate the end of our time in this office. Next week, no office; the week after that, new office. I guess I should figure out what trains to use to get there and back home.

Emptying the sea isn’t rewarding, so I switched to trying to get bees, but managed to mess up both smoking the bees and harvesting honeycomb from the hive.  Bah!

Read: The Mandroid Murders (Robin CM Duncan): It’s the future. A private eye who is a horndog and a fashion plate gets stuck with a teenaged mob heiress. Together, they fight crime, although really those guys had it coming.

Written: 274 for the day, 1050/1000 for the week, 9059 overall.

Office, with burgers. Since this is our last week in this office, I piled a bunch of stuff into a sack to bring home, where I will probably throw it away.

I found my copy of the Nimona comic, which I still had, but looking through my storage room did not really reduce my urge to throw everything into the sea.

Written: 388 words again. I guess the range of possible values there is small enough that a repeat isn’t that surprising. 776 words for the week, 8785 overall.

Not sure why World Population Day is less than nine months after International Kissing Day.

Early morning meeting for the CEO to tell us how we all have to suffer because the board set higher goals than Sales could reach. No layoffs this time, though, and probably my team’s hiring will not be affected.

In Minecraft, I built a hole to the bottom of the sea with the power of SAND, but it’s very slow and uses a lot of shovels, and even though the fjord out front of my great hall is allegedly a submerged ravine, I’m not finding much in the way of mineral wealth. Also I forgot to find and watch the Minecraft Musical.

Played: Lancer. I contributed nothing and also mistook a tree stump for a giant robot, so apparently I might as well have not bothered to show up. I should probably be writing on Tuesday nights anyway.

Written: FAIL, because I was wasting time gaming.

Played: Dark Matter, for the first time in a million years. We snuck into the Abyss until we got spotted, then we charged. The giant tentacle did not make our job any easier, but it didn’t make the demons’ job easier either, because Chaotic Evil Teamwork. Then we made it to the Infinite Bureaucracy Room, so we were able to take a long rest as long as somebody filled out some forms for the desk clerk to throw into the lake of fire every so often. Level UP! (Level 7 is not that great.)

Read: Angelina (Joel Shepherd): A teenager Italian wizard-slayer comes to NYC where the last two archmages are engaged in a cold war in search of terrible revenge, but everything is way more complicated and also there’s a boy and a nefarious plot and stuff. Looks bad for pretty much everybody by the end of the volume.

Written: 119 for the day, 611/1000 for the week, 8009/10000 overall.

Weirdly, I was on call only in the morning. Customers attacked, but they could not defeat me before I escaped to do grocery shopping.

Read: Amelia the Level Zero Hero vol 1 (VA Lewis): MC got sucked into a hell dimension where she fought monsters literally 24/7 for years, so when she escapes to LitRPG World, she is already more powerful than anyone without having a class or level. Drama and cultists ensue.

Read: Ships of the Line (Terry Mixon, JN Chaney): This episode is all about ramping up the new technology obtained from an unsavory source which definitely does not have any trojan horses or other hidden bugs.

Written: 206 for the day, 492 for the weak week, 7890 total.