Author: Trip the Space Parasite

More commuting, this time with bonus cascading transit failures. I made it in before the first meeting, so I guess that’s okay. Maybe I’ll get up even earlier next week, because the trains will still be messed up. It’s for the cause of electrification, which I definitely approve of, I just wish they could be better organized about it.

Read: Black Ops (Craig Alanson): Book four or so in the “Expeditionary Force” series, which Earl reminded me exists. A human fount of insane ideas and an absolutely terrifying ancient AI try to keep Earth out of the crosshairs of various asshole aliens, with mixed success but 110% shenanigans along the way. Has the problem common to MilSF where even the allegedly very advanced aliens have only incrementally better rifles and helicopters and whatnot, but who doesn’t like shenanigans?

Written: FAIL.

Couldn’t write this morning because as soon as I got up, I had to go to work.

Lunch at the office was Chick-Fil-A, but nobody asked me (possibly nobody was asked, I heard the lunch service just asks how many people and brings whatever they feel like)  and I couldn’t unspend the money, so I ate it. It wasn’t even good, although the fries might been better if they weren’t cold.

Read: Bianca Torre is Afraid of Everything (Justine Pucella Winans): Her list of fears is actually only 60 items long, but on the other hand it  covers most forms of human interaction, which is why she lurks in her room with a telescope and sees a murder. Traumatic hijinx and a side of gender euphoria ensue.

Written: FAIL.

Fortunately the time I had to get up today to attend early meetings was the same time I have to get up tomorrow to commute, so I’ll be awake and alert the rest of the week! Right?

Played: Lancer. NO giant robot fights this time, just discussion of the new age of blinkspace exploitation we have enabled. The End! Not sure what we’re playing next, but it will be without Dave, as he is no longer up for weeknight gaming.

Read: Blackwing (Ed McDonald): Dark fantasy in the shadow of two groups of immortal wizards fighting over the world and the magical devastation they leave behind. Or maybe it’s fantasy noir, since there’s corruption, betrayal, loyalty, mean streets, etc. Several named characters do survive until the end of the book, though!

Written: FAIL.

Played: Dark Matter. The conclusion of Death Race 800! Brina got to drive the wrong way around the track to play chicken and rescue the mysterious NPC who we now think might be a mutant red dragon in disguise, Bolt got to throw a bomb into the VIP seats, everyone got to crush the demons when they inevitably refused to accept a loss, level UP. Now we have one hour to get the dragon on-side before the chaos kraken eats everybody, no pressure.

Blblblbl.

Written: FAIL.

No office today, so I was able to handle my part of the zillion customer cases that came in without unnecessary discomfort and humanity. Spent a while setting up an important tool because the automatic copy from the old laptop didn’t happen, but I think overall it was better to set up the current version fresh.

Watched: My Hero Academia 6.21-23: Well, that villain didn’t last very long. Deku is becoming totally OP by the expected method of abandoning all self-care, but All Might is still not to be fucked with. Two episodes left in the season!

Read: “Salt Water” (Eugenia Triantafyllou): Kind of like “Ponies” but mermaids and fish and not darkest horror.

Read “Fitting In” (Max Gladstone): “Wild Cards” universe, a former reality-TV superhero and other Jokers protect a local institution from goons.

Written: FAIL.

More office. Not very many people mask, even in conference rooms, and I don’t think free burgers makes up for that.

Did some more mining in Minecraft, and finally broke into the giant cave from the side. It is only slightly less monster-guarded that way, though. Did find another abandoned mine, and also a lot of copper ore which should be useful but mostly isn’t. I guess I could compress it into copper blocks or cut copper and build a new house out of it or something.

Reread: Please Don’t Tell My Parents I Work For a Supervillain (Richard Roberts): I liked this better on reread, maybe because when I first read it, I was hoping it would be more like the Penny books. I’m surprised we haven’t seen the new character who was introduced at the end in subsequent books, though.

Read: Fluff vol 2 (RavensDagger): More silly superheroics, this time LitRPG. The main character gets more externalized superpowers and is definitely growing into her supervillain role. It’s also increasingly clear that the Hero and Villain tags are completely spurious.

Written: FAIL.

Back to the office, although at least there aren’t constant customer meetings this week. I got my new laptop with working keyboard, and will try to remember to not eat over it. The automatic transfer app doesn’t work (probably because of the security software, which always screws up everything) so I get to have two laptops until I’m sure I have everything I need transferred over.

Read: A House With Good Bones (T Kingfisher): Not as creepy as The Hollow Places, but even more Kingfishery. I felt pretty bad for the monsters, though.

Read: What Moves The Dead (T Kingfisher): A Kingfishery retelling of The Fall of the House of Usher, which I have never read. I felt even sorrier for the monsters in this one, though. I did not expect to read two Kingfisher books in a row in which merely being horrific and inimical to humanity is treated so unsympathetically!

Written: FAIL.

I had fun socializing on Saturday and Sunday, but there is no escaping the fact that I had zero (0) days without socialization, and now it is Monday again. Bah.

Got my cocoa bean farm going in my copy of the world, not that cocoa beans are that useful. If I ever have something I want to force-grow, though, apparently turning wheat and cocoa beans into cookies and composting the cookies yields way more fertilizer than composting the ingredients, so that’s… something.

Read: When The Guns Roar (Eric Thompson): Missiles in space have defeated the space orcs, despite the best efforts of the human elite, or at least annoyed the space orcs into stopping fighting. The series has mostly been about inter-human conflict anyway, though.

Written: Even though I’ve been saying FAIL for weeks, the bits and pieces have finally added up to 353 words.

Went over well before dinner to play Minecraft with Ayse and Nonny. I explored a swamp and a large mountain and only died a few times, so that was fun. Then Earl appeared (Cat was not feeling up to humans) so we talked about books and ate ham and various delicious sides and there was great happiness. Not sure Ken’s heretical explanation of Easter and Ayse’s Catholic explanation left Jus any the wiser, either alone or combined.

When I got home, we played even more Minecraft, because we can do that from different places, and used a copy of my world. I’ve barely started exploring the caves of the next island over, and Ayse and Nonny built a boat right away to sail hundreds of blocks away and rampage Acacia Island!

Read: Spy x Family vol 9 (Tatsuya Endo): End of the cruise ship arc where Yor murders everyone, but the focus is more on Anya and then there’s some small stories with various characters, including Bond. It’s hard being a doggo when humans are so weird.

Written: FAIL.

grocery shopping, burger lounge chicken tenders, egg dying, dumplings, barbecue pizza

Stayed in bed all morning reading, but finally had to get up and go grocery shopping. Since I never managed to get lunch, I ended up eating at the burger place next to the grocery store, which had chicken tenders that were battered(?) instead of breaded, so that was tasty. Then I went over to dye eggs with Jus and Nonny and fam, and ended up staying for Chinese dumplings. (Also I traded Ayse a dumpling that she was already going to have in her fridge as leftovers for a slice of barbecue pizza.) It was a pretty good afternoon.

Read: Please Don’t Tell My Parents I’m A Giant Monster (Richard Roberts): Eighth in the series, third of the spinoffs about secondary characters from the first arc. This time it’s the catgirl made of glass, who has to mostly use her healing powers to fix the microfractures she gets from walking around, sitting on insufficiently-padded chairs, etc. It is thus a book about disability and chronic pain as well as having a supervillain for a brother and finding mysterious ancient artifacts and so forth. I like it at least as much …Queen of the Dead.

Written: FAIL.

Did not go to the office, only had a few meetings. Yay.

Found cocoa beans in Minecraft, so I guess that island is a jungle biome. Also found a hidden bay, and dug a tunnel into a lagoon(?) adjacent to a valley that extends well below sea level and is also full of monsters. Sadly the caves contain no chests and don’t go very deep, but there’s another cave over the hill that’s bigger and possibly more interesting.

Read: Please Don’t Tell My Parents I’m Queen Of The Dead (Richard Roberts): Reread, because everybody likes teenage necromancers and romance and ghosts and reality TV and smooches.

Written: FAIL.

Went to the office again, did a work, ate a Korean drumstick, came home, died in a pit again.

Read: Lilith’s Shadow Omnibus vol 2 (Benjamin Medrano): Three more books of superheroic adventures and drama, including more possible girlfriends for the main character and also one or more attempts at planetary subjugation/destruction. Still emotionally a little flat, but full of genre.

Written: FAIL.

Six meetings between 7:15 and 12. Ugh.

I was right about the unexpected meetings being more of the same (IE, meaningless reassurances backed up by nothing, because capitalism).

No gaming, only unwellness.

Rocking the boat (while not in it) is the way to get it to despawn, which would be fine if it hadn’t involved punching the sheep into mutton. I guess my first sheep will have to wait a little longer for a friend. Also rowed over to the mainland(?) and mined some coal.

Read: Legionnaire (Jason Anspach, Nick Cole): Infantry in space. The setting is pretty much Star Wars: landspeeders, protocol droids, blasters, spaceships that fall out of the sky when destroyed, aliens that don’t have their own blasters but are entirely willing to work with rebels to slaughter government troops.

Written: FAIL.

Surprise meeting first thing in the morning, and not for a good reason, either. Multiple last-minute meetings before work tomorrow, too, probably to tell us the same thing on a larger scale.

In the afternoon, dentistry. The hygienist seemed very happy with the state of my teeth, though, so I guess I’ll keep up the flossing and brushing.

Did some messing about in boats in Minecraft, but could not figure out how to get the island sheep back out of my boat so I could lure it to my paddock.

Writing: FAIL.

 

Played: Dark Matter. Turns out Death Race 800 isn’t just a race, we have to stop at three (or maybe more) points to engage in minigames. Being first to the field is definitely an advantage, though, so it’s not not a race. The first minigame was capture the flag, set in an industrial catwalk maze with no safety features whatsoever. There were unfortunately rules about what we could do to the other flags before the second and third teams arrived, but none of them said we couldn’t weld a cable to it one of them for yoinking or stick the other one on top of the flame vent. The cable didn’t work as well as I hoped, but it did slow down the other teams stealing the flag enough that we could get all three and open the exit lock. Also a couple of the larger demons got discorporated, which should make things easier going forward. Next session, we have to rescue one of the NPCs we like before she gets tattooed drunkenly.

I tried to foil the Chinese restaurant’s attempt to give me bonus soup by getting different soup as part of my order, so they gave me bonus fried rice instead.

Watched: Shadow & Bone 2. Yeah, yeah, chosen one, reluctant hero, whatever. When does she get to be a living laser cannon?

Read: Against All Odds (Jeffery H Haskell): Missiles in space, but way too much heroic Christian Americans-in-all-but-name who don’t trust this out-of-control technological innovation vs degenerate swarthy Muslims who only want to rape white women and also all media and civilian oversight of the military might as well be working for the enemy.

Written: Eventually it added up to 157 for the week, but at least I’m not that much of a MAGAt.

So lethargic. Will I ever have the energy to get my blood tests done or my neck pinged? I barely managed to go grocery shopping and that’s something I do every week.

Got some maps going, and found out the zombie mine I found while tunneling downward in search of ore is actually way the heck out in the ocean. I guess that’s what happens when you generate dungeons randomly.

Watched: First episode of Shadow & Bone. Fortunately I haven’t read the books so I have no preconceptions, but I bet the criminals were also cooler in the books. They’re very Blades in the Dark.

Read: Beware of Chicken vol 2 (Casualfarmer): Everybody levels up doing farm and family things except the heroic xianxia rooster, who goes on a quest to learn magical secrets. Well, and the antagonists, but maybe being horrible is a family thing for them.

Written: FAIL.

 

At least I didn’t have to commute today, but where did my month go? Where did my quarter go? What is wrong with my life? Why do I only have one sister to come watch anime with me?

Watched: My Hero Academia 6.18-20: One of the downsides of making heroes an idealized class, or alternately, of entrusting society to “them” instead of “us”.

Read: You Sexy Thing (Cat Rambo): Soldiers who retired to run a restaurant get pulled into interstellar intrigue and piracy, with a living ship. For no apparent reason, there’s magic as well as high tech. Not like there needs to be a reason, I guess.

Written: FAIL.

Back to the office. Customers, why?

Today’s Minecraft accomplishments: added an emergency bath next to the lava-powered garbage disposal, mined some obsidian and crying obsidian (neither of which is super-useful, but they’re shiny).

Read: Lilith’s Shadow Omnibus vol 1 (Benjamin Medrano): Bioroid creation of a supervillain becomes a superhero, gets hot girlfriends, fights aliens and evil wizards and suspicious superheroes, etc. The romance seems pretty flat, though.

Written: FAIL.

Yep, more customer meeting. Why will they not just fix the thing?

Only played a little Minecraft today. My farm is full of soggy zombies and I can’t figure out how to get water in a bucket.

Played: Lancer. We got through one round of combat because people were feeling under the weather. Without that, we might have made it to the middle of the second round.

Read: Assorted Entanglements vol 1 (Mikanuji): A 28-year-old office lady who thought she was straight and an 18-year old semi-delinquent somehow fall in love after a one-night stand and begin a life together despite their weird families and different personalities.

Read: “The Imperfection” (Mae Murray): Also queer, but mostly yikes.

Written: FAIL. I probably could have written some, but I have to get up and go to the office tomorrow.

Back to the customer meetings, wheee.

I dug down to where I found many exciting minerals and a huge terrifying cavern and then a disused mine (IE, a dungeon) full of zombies and lapis and redstone. And they told me you couldn’t dig below 0 altitude!

Read: Dandadan vol 2 (Yukinobu Tatsu): Well, that’s one way to deal with a giant crab monster. But probably not a good way to deal with fellow highschool students or misplaced genitalia. And I just know the aliens are going to come back sooner or later.

Read: Ayashimon vol 1 (Yuji Kaku): The protagonist of One Punch Man gets recruited by a monster yakuza girl to be muscle for her climb to the power that is rightfully hers. Meh, but at least has a good reason for why enemies explode into money when defeated.

Written: FAIL.

Today I went to visit Ayse and Ken and everybody to play Minecraft socially. That’s definitely better. Also we had delicious Thai food and Ken made me a sugar-free chocolate cream pie, because it was nominally my birthday celebration. I could not blow out the candles with a single clap, though. I guess I need to practice up for next year!

Written: FAIL.

I went grocery shopping and then did pretty much nothing for the entire day.

Read: Mimicking of Known Successes (Malka Older): It’s like Holmes/Watson except they’re WLW, so that part is fine, but they’re on Jupiter where humanity has taken refuge after destroying the ecosystems of both Earth and Mars, and just no. Domed cities on a devastated Earth are much more habitable.

Read: “A Dream of Electric Mothers” (Wole Talabi): The question of whether to trust the AI amalgamated from the minds of past generations or not, in a future (alternate?) Africa.

Written: FAIL.

Yay, I get to work from home again! But there’s still a multi-hour customer meeting every day and it looks like we’re going to continue next week.

Fortunately the meeting is in the morning, so I was able to skip out early to go see Jus perform in Once Upon A Mattress (clean middle-school version). There was singing! There was dancing! There was heteronormativity, but otherwise it was great all around! We will be able to say we knew famous actress Jus when she was just starting out!

Writing: FAIL.

Back to the office. I need better shirts and/or collar points. And an iron and ironing board, probably. Ugh. Clothes, why?

Instead of doing anything useful when I got home, I played more Minecraft. Not sure what this fire and lava and weird purple dirt is doing in the middle of my island, but I guess I’ll mine some of it.

Read: Beyond the Burn Line (Paul McAuley): The sophonts after the sophonts after the sophonts that succeed an extinct humanity might be better at society, but they have UFO weirdos too.

Written: FAIL.

This is the week we have to start being in the office two days a week, so I got up much earlier than I wanted to (although to be fair, I never want to get up) and trundled up to Mountain View.

The customer meetings will never end, possibly because the customer will never accept that they have to fix their problems instead of us waving a magic wand.

Read: Without Mercy (Eric Thompson): More human-on-human violence in space.

Written: FAIL.