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…
Yay electricity! Otherwise not an exciting day.
Written: 229 words. Almost certain I’m not just counting the words from Sunday again.
Power went out at 2 this morning, and didn’t come back until after 15, so I spent a lot of the day wandering around trying to find a place to work from. All the coffee shops were full of WFHers, so I ended up in the Campbell Express Library, but it is teeny and had only a chair, no power. When I ran out of battery, I got lunch and then went to the nice big coffee shop in downtown Campbell, which by that time did have some room and some power outlets, and also coworker S from my previous job! It was very surprising and also nice to see her.
I was afraid the power was going to be out for ages, because the outage page never gave an ETA, but it was because they couldn’t be arsed to tell us, not because they didn’t know, and suddenly I got the notification that power was restored so I trundled home to sit with my electricity and my hydration and my computer.
For whatever reason, I did not sleep well without power (lack of fan noise?) but I was still somewhat productive.
Played: Lancer. Once again, downloading supertech off the space internet turns out to be a bad idea (except when Abrakyl does it, obviously), and we had to chase down the parts of somebody’s base, which had turned into a swarm of weird little robots and wandered off. They were extremely annoying little robots, so we’re looking forward to next week when Tinca will be there with her area-effect missiles.
Written: FAIL, only gaming.
I felt a little more functional this morning than I have the past few weeks. Maybe it’s getting far enough from the solstice? It’s not like I get up before sunrise, but I do stay up past sunset, so I’m not completely disconnected from sunlight.
Written: 280 words.
I went outside, twice, and never got rained on. Go me!
Played: Dark Matter. We finally discovered the mysterious secret at the heart of the asteroid (it’s a hellaspud), but then we talked our way out of getting our memories wiped and/or being spaced, so I guess the campaign will continue. The librarian turned out to be an actual fiend, much to Sesamina’s dismay.
Written: 229 words.
I went grocery shopping, answered one question from a coworker, and leveled up my Dark Matter characters for tomorrow.
Read: Stray Cat Strut ch 5.1-35 (RavensDagger): Oh no, now I’m caught up!
Read: Red Equinox (Douglas Wynne): Modern-day Mythos adventure, has some good spooky description, but there’s apparently some sort of counter-force to the Mythos, which is a wimpout for cosmic horror.
Read: Lever Action ch 1-23 (RavensDagger): Fantasy Western with D&D races plus mecha. It’s not clear how much colonialism is going on as opposed to warfare between existing inhabitants, but meh.
Written: Ongoing FAIL.
The Republican scourge finally managed to get their act together enough to make their least-favorite traitor Speaker of the House. I suppose that’s better than armed insurrection, but seriously, fuck all those guys.
Read: Stray Cat Strut vol 4 (RavensDagger): No, the alien invaders will never give anyone a day off.
Written: 180 words, I guess. Whatever.
Extremely stupid and useless today also. At least the threatened terrible weather has not come to visit San Jose.
Read: Stray Cat Strut vol 3 (RavensDagger): Sometimes the inhuman monstrosity is capitalism after all.
Written: Unending FAIL.
Why am I so terrible at everything?
Read: Stray Cat Strut ch 2.9-81 (RavensDagger): Two separate arcs, plus smut!
Written: FAIL. No brain. No words. No nothing.
Company is open for business as usual, so we all had to be there at the usual time, and the customers were there too. Not in force, at least, and the early Tuesday meeting seems to have been dropped for now. We have two new coworkers who will be doing a specialized thing, but I don’t know whether they’re cool yet.
Read: Stray Cat Strut ch 1.27-77, 2.1-8 (RavensDagger): Our heroine not only survived but was reunited with her girlfriend and family, and then got a quest from a fellow participant in the alien points scheme.
Played: Lancer. Finished the fight fairly quickly, found out unregulated NHPs were involved (which made Abrakyl and Early happy), then found out some people are onto other people, which might be us or might be somebody else. But the people we defeated let us use their printer to fix up our mechs, so that’s all good.
Written: FAIL.
Back to the answer mines! I wasn’t at work today, but I was on call. The thing for the customer was finished during my shift, so I got to announce it to them, and will take all credit for it.
Also managed to go grocery shopping this morning, which made me hate life and time but otherwise worked fine and I should be able to eat almost every day until Saturday.
Read: Stray Cat Strut ch 1-26 (RavensDagger): Dystopian cyberpunk future in which hungry aliens invade and allegedly benevolent aliens pick people to enroll in the kill-invaders-in-exchange-for-hyper-technology program. Feels a little like a video game in that guns and medical gear and cyberware appear out of nowhere the instant points are spent, but there isn’t any more to the system than that, so I’m not sure it counts as LitRPG.
Read: Butts: A Backstory (Heather Radke): A little bit about butts physically (bipedalisms, endurance hunting, etc) and a lot about butts socially, from the Hottentot Venus to Twerking on Tiktok. Spoiler: the answer is always sexism, and usually misogynoir.
Read: The Girl I Like Forgot Her Glasses vol 1 (Koume Fujichika): Therefore she has to lean in really close to share the male lead’s textbook, which is hard on an innocent manga boy’s heart. Cute, but very slight, and the female lead seems to mostly exist to be klutzy.
Written: 157 words. Two days in a row!
I don’t think I did anything whatsover today. Just stupid pad games and web serials.
Read: Hive Minds Give Good Hugs ch 1-41 (ThundaMoo): Starts off stranded on an alien planet with amnesia and major anxiety, gets even more traumatic but with increasing lack of human frailty and limitations from there. What could go wrong with nigh-infinite power? A whole lot, as it turns out.
Written: 304 words.
Got up way too early at a sensible hour for the cleaners, then went back to bed, then got woken up by Ken texting that he is still sick and NYE fondue party is cancelled. Festive food was a 90-minute wait and it was raining out, so I stayed home and ate food from the fridge and did nothing. I was on call in the afternoon, but nothing happened.
Read: Love Crafted ch 45-80 (RavensDagger): The end! Pretty abrupt and the commenters didn’t like it, but whatever. Omnipotent tentacles can only go so long without solving the Inquisition problem for good.
Read: Dreamer’s Ten-Tea-Cle Café ch 1-44 (RavensDagger): Spin-off, mostly for the purpose of crossovers with other web serials, but also to follow the personal development of Dreamer’s pamphlet-distributing clone.
Written: FAIL. No more words for 2022.
Got up before noon, although not significantly more useful today than the rest of the week.
Read: Yakuza Reincarnation vol 4 (Hiroki Miyashita, Takeshi Natsuhara): Our old old- school yakuza isekai’d into the body of a teenage princess continues to clobber people and demons who do crime wrong and befriend people who do crime right, this time including pirates. mermaids, and dwarves.
Read: Cinnamon Bun ch 330-371 (RavensDagger): Oh no, I’m caught up! Fortunately there is obviously a lot more mostly-wholesome adventure still to come.
Read: Love Crafted ch 1-44 (RavensDagger): An aspiring magic school student uses an off-brand summoning spell and ends up with a relative of Azathoth, who fortunately only wants cuddles, hugs, snuggles, naps, and the occasional nap. Somewhat incoherent because it was guided by reader votes while it was being written
Written: Unending FAIL.