Accomplished nothing today, but it’s nominally okay because I’m still on vacation?
Read: Komi Can’t Communicate vol 25 (Tomohito Oda): The entire volume is a Nerf war of grade against grade, full of new characters that I cannot keep straight. Maybe I shouldn’t have started a series that was guaranteed to have at least 101 named characters.
Written: 286 for the day at week, 7684 overall. Past the three-quarters mark!
It was a nice vacation. There was a baby, who is very cute and likes stealing glasses and saying “babababaabbbbaabababa”. There was air conditioning, so we did not die when it was 42C outside. There was the traditional Chinese food and grilled stuff and splashing in the pool. There was conversation. (Our hosts recently went to Japan and returned with tales.) There was a long stretch of sitting in cars, with a brief interruption to sit on folding chairs and watch fireworks at close range. (Nonny had a comment for each one, because he hasn’t seen a lot of fireworks.) There were board games. There were so many snacks. Eventually we got our act together and returned to San Jose.
Played: Everdell. We played this twice, so I have enough data to conclude that I am terrible at this game. I’d say the dual use of cards as discardable currency pushes it into Race for the Galaxy territory, but I’m sure that’s quite right. Mostly I’m just dumb. I’m sorry, cute forest creatures!
Played: Roll for the Galaxy. I came in second, which was also last.
Played: Pandemic. We also had the On The Brink expansion, but the extra roles didn’t save us. I came in last, along with all of humanity.
Played: Sagrada. I managed to get my tableau complete, but failed on all the victory conditions, so I came in last.
Watched: I totally thought I was going to do something useful when I got home, but instead I got chicken with too many bones and watched the start of a ridiculous anime called Estab Life. It’s the cyberpunk fantasy future, everybody has to live in their cultural burbclave, cute girl shadowrunners help them defect in pursuit of their unapproved dreams.
Written: FAIL. I had my laptop, and my current draft is in Dropbox, so I could have written, yet I did not. Pretty sure I can still make my overall goal, although this may not be my strongest week.
Zooming away to Roseville (which has not actually been in Roseville for quite a few years now). Someone told us there would be a baby.
I’m not writing this until the 5th, so I don’t remember what, if anything, I did today. I think I bought a sandwich for lunch, because it’s Too Hot and then died in a sweltering pit. Also probably I packed for tomorrow. And read the new batch of short SF commissioned by Amazon to entice people to Kindle Unlimited.
Read: “The Long Game” (Ann Leckie): A squishy short-lived species is oppressed by capitalist humans, but possibly not forever.
Read: “How It Unfolds” (James SA Corey): When you copy yourself, the copies all have the same history with the same people, but maybe they don’t have to have the same future.
Read: “Void” (Veronica Roth): Murder mystery in the locked room of a relativistic passenger liner. It may only shuttle between Sol and Centauri, but the time adds up…
Read: “Falling Bodies” (Rebecca Roanhorse): A young human is stuck between the colonialist aliens that conquered humanity and the human resistance.
Read: “Just Out of Jupiter’s Reach” (Nnedi Okorafor): Seven people given bonded bioships meet for a week after five years of solitude. Actually I expected even more drama.
Read: “Slow Time Between The Stars” (John Scalzi): An AI capable of managing a sub-relativistic journey might not be as much like its human creators as they hoped. I suspect the AI was based on engrams from my friend Dave.
Written: 562 today, 1982/1000 for the week, 7398/1000 overall.
We went to the park to see Jus’s Shakespeare camp production of Twelfth Night, Abridged Cowboy Version. Obviously she was brilliant, but also it was 897582 degrees outside so we all died and I didn’t come back to life until Marith came over for pizza and anime.
Watched: Mob Psycho 100 3.9-12: This time, Mob must face… his own heart! The end (of season 3).
Read: Micchi vs The New World vol 4 (Jammin’ Rabbit aka Tony Huo): We finally find out why the long-lost senpai of the main character has been doing all these terrible things, and everything is resolved. Also a lot of people get severely clobbered because seriously, don’t fuck with Micchi. The end.
Written: Only 176, but that’s more than my daily goal, and brings me to 1420 for the week, 6836 overall. More than 2/3 of the way to my 10-week goal!
Went to the office again, so Former Coworker A could meet up with us for Costco food court lunch, which people had been trying to do for weeks in memory of the old days. Costco is only a block form the office, so I guess in the old days before we had fancy bribes to get people in the office like delivered lunch, everybody would go to Costco for pizza and hotdogs.
Now I am on vacation.
Read: Kelcie Murphy and the Academy for the Unbreakable Arts (Erika Lewis): 12-year-old with special parentage and secret magical powers finds out she’s going to magical fighting school, weird teachers, puppy love, war in the magical world, Celtic mythology edition. Some disability representation, more authentic modern-orphan backstory. Doesn’t seem entirely well-edited.
Written: 419 today, 1244 for the week, 6660 overall.
Went to the office, it was annoying, ate a sandwich, it was okay.
Written: 347 today, 825 for the week, 6241 overall.
No Lancer, Kelsey and Vivian are both out of it, so Brooks and Ken and I played a few rounds on Board Game Arena. Innovation is fun, but it turns out I’m terrible at it. I’m also still terrible at Race For the Galaxy but this comes as no surprise.
Written: FAIL. Because I am dumb.
Having the twelve hours of special on-call split six and six is much better.
Written: 478 for the day and the week, 5894 overall.
After sleeping in forever like a stupid lump, I went over to play Minecraft. I ran into the wilderness, then burrowed into the depths of the Earth in search of dripstone, then died horribly in burning lava. After that Nonny switched to Geometry Dash for his Youtube channel, so Ayse and I made our own world. We have bamboo and a verdant cave and a house that’s more or less zombie-proof and a desert village right next door and a paddock to lure animals into. After that, we ate delicious pork chile verde that Jus and Ken made and then I came home to write.
Written: 578 words, for a total of 2035 this week and 5416 overall. Only three weeks out of ten and I’m already halfway to my goal!
Didn’t accomplish much of anything today, although I did go shopping early enough to successfully get more quarters.
Read: Minami’s Lover (Shungiku Uchida): A somewhat strange manga about a girl who shrinks to 1/12 scale and secretly lives in her boyfriend’s room with him. Did not have the ending I was expecting.
Read: Prison of Sleep (Tim Pratt): Conclusion to The Doors of Sleep, in which everything is explained. I got confused by the parallel narratives, and not less confused when they joined, but I think that was just me. Probably also me that I liked traveling through all the different worlds during the setup phase of the story than I liked narrowing down to the conclusion. Although I seem to recall not being impressed with previous Pratt endings.
Written: I could not get my brain going until it was time to go to bed, but then I squeezed out 189 words. 1457 for the week, 4838 overall.
Went to Shakespeare in the Park with Ayse & fam and Marith who is back from France. It was Twelfth Night, telenovela edition with dramatic music stings, so that was pretty fun.
Written: FAIL, the play went later than I expected.
On call for special customers from 7-19 again, so I didn’t go into the office. Coworker K is back from getting married. Young people these days, I swear.
Work was okay, if blah, but then as soon as I wanted to do my own stuff on my own computer, my keyboard completely freaked out. Whichever function key shrinks the windows so they all fit nonoverlapping on the screen kept spamming as long as the keyboard was switched on, so now I’m back to my old keyboard, with the dodgy C key and the however-many-years’ accumulation of grot. Not sure how writing is going to go.
Read: The Dos and Donuts of Love (Adiba Jaigirdar): A Bangaladeshi-Irish girl enters a baking competition reality TV show. There is star-crossed gay romance! Donut-shop rivalry! Intrigue! Betrayal! Racism! Only a little fat-phobia and hardly any homophobia, though.
Written: 256 today, 1268 for the week, 4649 total. I guess that was okay.
Went into the office, found out the office is moving to about a five-minute walk from the place I lived before I moved to San Jose, ate some fairly satisfying Reubens.
Written: 459 today, 1012/1000 for the week, 4393 overall.
Got cleaners in to make my apartment slightly less horrible. I need to get a whole bunch of stuff off the floor or into the trash if I want to have cats in here, though.
Played: Lancer. Nobody remembered how this game works after Ken cancelled three weeks in a row, but Vivian has brain electrodes, so that’s cool.
Written: FAIL.
Started off the week by having to be available for twelve hours straight, but only the part that was during normal business hours had any activity, so I guess that was okay.
Written: 553 today, 553 for the week, 3934 overall.
Sorry, all father points are revoked upon becoming a Trump voter. I don’t make the rules.
Since there isn’t Sunday gaming for the next however long, and this would be an off week anyway, I swapped with somebody to take their oncall shift today. I think they’re a father or something. But the customers did not attack, so mostly I was useless all day.
We did some Minecraft in the afternoon. I mostly harvested cobwebs and vegetables from the abandoned village, and flailed about in caves looking for dripstone. I replanted the vegetables, but I have no idea if the cobwebs regenerate.
Read: Shadows of a Dying Sun (Alan Bahr): An OSRish game with several tables of dying-earth genre stuff, lots of resource tracks to manage, and an inexorable progression toward death instead of hit points per se. Also there’s an event where someone predicts that the world will end tomorrow and there’s a 10% chance they’ll be right.
Written: 144 tonight, 1734 for the second week, 3381 for both weeks so far.
I slept in forever, but felt slightly less useless afterwards, so maybe that was good? Probably not, though. Only one of my four errands failed due to lateness, anyway.
Written: 375 today, 1590 for the week, 3237 overall.
At least VP B isn’t pretending that losing a big chunk of our team doesn’t suck. But he’s a much better manager than departed Boss R.
Written: Apparently this is my failure day for the week. Hopefully I can keep it to one.
In the office again, for Chick-Fil-A and meetings about support for the ~Special~ customers, which the now-sacked Boss R was supposed to have gotten sorted and which is not sorted. Also my custom of commuting home in the middle of the afternoon is now officially approved.
Read: Ruby Finley vs The Interstellar Invasion (K Tempest Bradford): An 11-year-old black girl who likes bugs finds a mysterious bug and trouble ensues. Even though it’s set in the present (smartphones, Twitter, etc) the main character gets to ride her bike around the neighborhood and visit her friends without having an adult and a car and a schedule.
Read: “The Star-Bear” (Michael Swanwick): I think I’m not Russian enough, or not Russian-lit-reading enough, to get this one. Pretty sure the bear is a metaphor, though.
Written: 102 today, 1215 for the week, 2862 overall.
Back to the office for no good reason. American restaurant pasta for lunch. Light customer activity, which would seem lighter if we weren’t missing so many people.
Read: Spell Sweeper (Lee Edward Fodi): It’s the anti-Harry Potter, where the main character has tiny magical powers so instead of learning real magic at Secret Magic School, she’s on the janitorial track, and her hated rival is the Chosen One, a magical prodigy, tall and beautiful, beloved by everyone, etc. Naturally they have to work together to save the world, despite the unhelpfulness of the adult wizards.
Written: 229, 1113, 2760.
Did I do anything today? I don’t think so. Just blblblblblbl.
No gaming, because after cancelling the past two sessions for work, Ken is now on vacation.
Read: Drew Leclair Gets A Clue (Katryn Bury): A 7th-grader who wants to be a criminal profiler tries to unmask her school’s cyberbully while also dealing with health issues, meatspace bullies, friends who might be into kissing, and her mom having run off with the school counselor.
Written: 302 words today, 884 for the week, 2531 overall.
We had no Marith, but we played Minecraft anyway. The 9-Channel Lavamatic and Obsidian Condenser are done except that I need five more dripstone stalactites and when I went looking for some I ended up stuck in a cave full of lava and apparently with lots of water above me so I can’t dig out. Also Nonny built a cobblestone generator that (usually) puts the cobblestone right into a chest. After that, we ate grilled imitation meats and went to a park and searched for the lost art of conversation and Ayse tried to talk me into getting cats. I have to admit, cats are good.
Written: FAIL. That leaves me at 1647/1000 for the week, though, so I guess I set my weekly goal appropriately for my level of lameness.
I managed to not only go grocery shopping, but also get quarters. The nice credit union lady exchanged me an extra roll, so now I can go longer before having to remember to restock, hurray.
Then I did a lot of nothing.
Marith has flown away to France with her horrible mother. I hope she can enjoy the France and not worry about what random old people think of her clothes.
Read: The Calamitous Bob chapter 1-30: Isekai/LitRPG, but instead of a teenager, the MC is a French soldier. This only helps somewhat. Also her local guide is alarming.
Written: 140 today, 1647 for the week and overall.
Read: Translation State (Ann Leckie): This really shows why everybody hates the Radchaai. Also, lots more about Presger Translators. The Presger themselves remain mysterious.
Written: 400 today, 1508 for week/overall.
We had two separate going-away celebrations for Coworker A (who was Boss A when I joined), who is leaving us to go back to her ancestral homeland. She’s been a pillar of the team the whole time I’ve been with Aerospike, so it is sad to see her go, but hopefully she will do well in this new phase of her life!
Written: 229 for the day, 1103 for the week and overall.
Taco Wednesday in the office.
New (minor) Minecraft version, but I only logged in enough to make sure my main world still works.
Read: Some Desperate Glory (Emily Tesh): Yes, the MC is supposed to be that awful at the beginning, because she is starting her story of personal growth (and saving a lot of people) from the very bottom. Much of the plot could have been avoided if the aliens had a better concept of security, but that wasn’t really the point.
Written: 305 for the day, 878 for the week and overall.
No gaming, I blame capitalism. Instead, Marith came over and we watched more Mob Psycho 100. Also I played too much Minecraft, and got ganked by a wet zmobie when I stopped to mine clay on my way to the village where I might be able to turn my string into emeralds. I managed to refloor my hall of making, though, even the edges under the furniture.
Watched: Mob Psycho 100 3.6-8: End of the giant broccoli (and Dimple?), then aliens. That was actually super-nice of the Telepathy Club.
Read: My Cute Little Kitten vol 1 (Milk Morinaga): Roommates adopt an orphan kitten in a no-pets apartment, then one confesses to the other, but the kitten has excellent (terrible) timing for cat stuff. Life ensues, in slices.
Written: 167 today, 573 for the week, 573 overall.
Pizza for Pages started today. Despite my great incompetence, I did most of a co-writing session and got almost half my weekly quota in one evening. But, can I do it more than once a week?
Read: Marvel Meow (Nao Fuji): Wordless cartoons of the cat from Captain Marvel causing trouble for other Marvel superheroes. (Are they really all in the MCU now?) The art style is cute, but the storytelling wasn’t that strong. But, flerken!
Written: 406 for the day, the week, and the whole writing challenge.
I didn’t want to get up, but I went grocery shopping and got a lunch anyway, but even though I was in time, there was no family Minecraft because Ayse and Ken are flat from too much soccer tournament. Instead I spent the afternoon in my own world, ripping up flooring so I could replace it with (correctly-aligned) glazed terracotta. Now the main hall has a nicer pattern, and the hall of magic has a purple floor. The hall of making will have a grey floor, I think, although I’m not sure I can dig under everything that’s there to replace the floor in-place. We’ll see. Hopefully I won’t create a basement full of zmobies again.
Read: “The Puppetmaster” (Kemi Ashing-Giwa): Turns out making deals with demons might have complications.
Read: “Counting Casualties” (Yoon Ha Lee): It’s not Hexarchate, but the same kind of magical technology and duty and horror.
Written: 211.