Author: Trip the Space Parasite

Wasted the whole day either abed or reading web serials again. Managed to step out in the evening to look for steamed pork buns, but neither the Chinese restaurant I normally go nor the sketchy-seeming one near Marith’s work had them, so I ended up with pizza slices instead. They were okay, but not what I really wanted.

Yes, I am aware that being unproductive is a powerful anticapitalist action, but 1) I want to do my own stuff, not work, and 2) that only applies to other people anyway.

Read: I’m the Evil Lord of an Intergalactic Empire vol 1 (Kai Nadashima, Yomu Mishima, Nadare Takamine): The isekai MC, having died broke, betrayed, and alone on Earth, determines to make the worst (for everyone else) of being reincarnated as the ruler of a planet, and the entity that reincarnated him is entirely in favor of this plan, but somehow he’s not being a terrible ruler or a terrible person.

Read: Cinnamon Bun ch 269-329 (RavensDagger): Time to grind the Hugging skill! And save the world by telling people to stop being so mean.

Written: Continued FAIL.

With nothing on the schedule, I ended up sleeping until after noon and then not doing anything at all, because I fundamentally suck. I guess I did manage to go grocery shopping, but that hardly counts.

Read: Cinnamon Bun ch 194-268 (RavensDagger): Continuing wholesome adventures. The wand of cure hysteria has shown up a few more times, but nobody can bear to explain what it actually is to the MC, so she continues on in innocence, leaving appalled expressions in her wake (which is what she does most of the time, regardless of whether any magic items are involved, because PCs).

Written: FAIL.

Due to a massive failure of vacation-scheduling on my part, I had to work today, but customers were relatively undemanding.

Read: Cinnamon Bun ch 67-193 (RavensDagger): Continued LitRPG adventures of a very innocent teenager and assorted friends. It’s not her fault she has to commit the worst crimes imaginable!

Written: Apparently people on Royal Road write a million words a year. That’s like 3000 words per day, or about two NaNoWriMos per month, every single month. I can barely write 3000 words in a month! Probably less, if I keep staying up until 2:00 reading.

Or, this year, “Christmas (observed)”. I thought about going grocery shopping but instead did absolutely nothing.

Watched: The School for Good and Evil: Apparently I read the book several years ago, but either I don’t remember any of it, or the movie is heavily modified, but it was entertaining anyway. Who even needs Gryffindors and Ravenclaws anyway? (Not that the Hufflepuffs would want anything to do with the Evers and their fake goodness.)

Read: The Maid I Hired Recently is Mysterious vol 4 (Wakame Konbu): It’s good to see the maid’s schtick breaking down in the face of growing feelings.

Written: FAIL.

And a Nifty Newtonmas to all!

Marith and I went over to Monkeycat Towers for dinner and presents and children and happiness, and it was very nice. Earl and Cat were also there, so we had morbid dinner conversation because we’re a bunch of weirdos. I did not get any presents in wrapping paper, but I did get delicious food, delightful company, and the Hug Assortment Pack. Also we played some Goose Goose Duck, which is like Among Us with more complicated maps and more character roles. I did not manage to be so sus that I got spaced even when that was my victory condition, which was a little disappointing.

Read: Icebreaker (Glynn Stewart): Standalone fantasy of a kind that used to be more common. Not sure about some of the worldbuilding (that seems like an awful lot of information loss), but I enjoyed it anyway.

Written: FAIL.

Stayed in bed forever, gave Marith her eggs and milk so she can make brownies and hot chocolate, wrapped a bunch of presents. The roll of wrapping paper I bought like five years ago hasn’t run out, and was almost wide enough to wrap the big present, so I guess next year’s presents will look very similar to this year’s.

Read: A Very Meowy Christmas (Zoe Chant): An extremely goopy book by the Kit part of Zoe Chant. There is one (1) bad thing that happens in this book and it is off-screen and several years in the past. Otherwise, everything is wonderful, and arguably the HEA starts around chapter 2. If you want to be full of cynicism, this is not the book for you. It even addresses one point I’ve wondered about with the Fated Mates trope, although not in a way that makes it any more palatable to heartless killjoys.

Written: 133 words.

Hurray, I’m on vacation! Boo, I’m on call!

The customers were worse than I hoped, but not nearly as bad as I feared, and I wasn’t even on call until after I managed to go grocery shopping and get lunch, so I guess it wasn’t that bad.

Read: The Grand Conspiracy (Terry Mixon, JN Chaney): This volume is all about inter-human conflict because there’s a break in the alien onslaught, and what human would work with other humans to survive when instead they could die with slightly more toys than that other guy?

Read: Holstaurus Magic (Warren Thomas): Extremely raunchy smut. Not really LitRPG even though set in a VRMMORPG. Does cater to certain specific interests, but there is a lot of regular banging too.

Read: Komi Can’t Communicate vol 22 (Tomohito Oda): Further NYC adventures. Also, only 22 volumes into the series, Komi is communicating almost entirely in speech! Whispers, but definite speech, not writing!

Written: FAIL. No brain.

 

Last work day of the year week! Except for tomorrow, when I’m on call in the afternoon and have no idea what customer activity will be like.

We exposed the new manager to the weekly technical training meeting. He may be reconsidering his life choices.

I think I have all the presents I planned on-hand and just need to wrap them. Except that I’m sure I’ve forgotten someone/something and it will all turn out terrible.

Read: Azarinth Healer vol 1 (Rhaegar): A young kickboxer gets isekaied and ends up with a mysterious OP class that enables her in pursuing her favorite activities in a new world: fighting, training, fighting, eating, fighting, sleeping, fighting, sex, fighting, and fighting. Not everybody is as nigh-invincible as her, though, so there is also some trauma. There is not particularly any plot.

Written: 206 words.

Don’t want to work. Want to sleep. But sleep pays so poorly.

Played: Lancer. As usual, we ended in the middle of a fight, but it’s pretty close to over. Then we get to start grilling the other team to see if their story matches. Dave mentioned a twist, but I bet that will be on the third data point we try to gather.

Written: FAIL. It’s not like I even went to bed early after gaming, I just suck.

It’s only 90% of a Monday, because I have Friday sort of off! But this did not get me more functional.

Read: Betrayed (Lindsay Buroker): Further adventures of the half-dwarf who just wants to know what happened to her mother and live her life, and the unfairly hot elven assassin she totally doesn’t have a crush on. Also conspiracies and bounty hunters and overfunded villains.

Read: SHWD vol 1 (sono.N): Extremely buff women hunting down outbreaks of brain-melting monsters and having interpersonal (but pretty good-natured) drama. No, buffer than that.

Written: 374 words.

I got up and went grocery shopping and got lunch in a timely manner, and then didn’t manage to do anything the rest of the day. I am really not good at getting anything done, ever.

Read: Ophelia After All (Racquel Marie): After getting a crush on a new boy about every month since she was in third-grade, a Cuban-American high school senior has to face that she might not be as straight as she thought, while dealing with love polygons, prom and graduation, and general friend-group upheaval.

Written: 281 words.

Nobody likes going into the office in 2022, but Ken very kindly gave me a lift to Mountain View, so I did not have to get up so early, and I hid in a small conference room most of the day so I did not have to breathe with people. I did come out and unmask to eat holiday lunch (salad, roast veg, mashed spud, roll+horseradish+roast beast, so not sure what holiday tradition that is, maybe British? Tasty, though.), which hopefully did not fill me with plague. I also got grilled a lot in the training meeting, because I was sitting right across from the instructor, but fortunately I knew many answers.

Read: Magister’s Bane (Yvette Bostic): The main character starts off ugly to the point of deformity but then is revealed to be actually super-hot as soon as she is brought into the magical world. I am not sure what think about that plot twist. At least she still has severe self-esteem issues from spending her entire life with people avoiding looking at her face.

Read: “Haley and the Miraculous Potion” (MCA Hogarth): Christmas episode, so of course it’s even more overtly Christian that usual. (IMHO, it’s super-weird how Christians take Jewish scripture telling ancient monoloatrous Jews not to worship the gods of other tribes and try to make it relevant to their monotheism, but this sentence could have ended after the word “scripture”.)

Read: Yakuza Reincarnation vol 3 (Hiroki Miyashita, Takeshi Natsuhara): Old-school yakuza reincarnated into a fantasy princess continues to beat the snot out of people doing crime wrong.

Written: 385 words, no kittens.

I really need to do more, better, works. Instead I did some works and then went over to visit Ayse and Ken and Dave and Jus and Nonny. We had vague intentions of watching something but instead we just ate Thai food and searched for the lost art of conversation and chased Nonny around. It was very nice.

Read: The Baby-Sitters Club: Kristy and the Snobs; Good-bye Stacey, Good-bye; Jessi’s Secret Language (Ann M Martin, Chan Chau, Gabriela Epstein): vol 10-12, which is all that currently exists. Stacey really did leave! I guess Kristy can’t go all class warfare if she lives in a mansion too. Jessi’s language is not all that secret, although I’m sure it was more so in back in the day. She uses it for good, though.

Read: Your Guide to Not Getting Murdered in a Quaint English Village (Maureen Johnson, Jay Cooper): Spoiler: The only way to win the game is not to play. Includes Goreyesque illustrations.

Written: 134 kitten words, finishing the entry I was working on. Tomorrow, if I am not dead from working and commuting, I will write things that are not that.

Early-morning meeting that was fairly useful, although we mostly didn’t have any questions, so maybe it should have been a video? We might have had questions, though.

Read: The Baby-Sitters Club: Dawn and the Impossible Three; Kristy’s Big Day; Boy-Crazy Stacey; Logan Likes Mary Anne!; Claudia and the New Girl (Ann M Martin, Gale Galligan, Gabriela Epstein): vol 5-9, with weddings, crushes, more crushes, what would be a crush in something written with completely modern sensibilities, and a zillion adorable but sometimes ill-behaved kids.

Written: 669 kitten words, but you know? I could just not. It is perfectly reasonable for a kitten to get busy and fall out of the habit of journaling. It’s even happened before.

What do you mean, another day? Already?

Read: No Honor In Death (Eric Thomson): Missiles in Space, but at least half about internal corruption and lack of morale. The space navy is very retro, and the main character is probably not entirely healthy either.

Read: The Baby-Sitters Club: The Truth About Stacy; Mary Anne Saves The Day; Claudia and Mean Janine (Raina Telgemeier. Ann M Martin): further adventures in baby-sitting and middle-school friendship and family drama. I am hoping this will make my own writing about similar-aged protagonists less terrible, but the genres might be too different.

Written: 541 kitten words.

Played: Dark Matter. We fought our way through the decoy treasure room full of exploding robot spiders and other fun stuff, discovered the hidden drive component (2/4), and then found the real treasure room which was full of the books we were looking for and also ANCIENT DRAGON!!! We beat feet back to the librarian to let her know we had found the books, but although Sesamina was rooting for her, she did not seem to have enough Hit Dice to do anything about it at this time. We do get to level up to 4th level, though.

Read: “The Garden” (Tomi Champion-Adeyemi): Part verse, part prose, all literary, only arguably spec-fic.

Written: 223 kitten words.

I managed to get up and go grocery shopping at pretty much the time I intended, but then was completely useless. Around midafternoon, I realized I was yawning and yawning, so I took a nap, but when I woke up it was already dark so I was very discombobulated and even more useless.

Fortunately the customers were extremely quiescent. Hopefully that will hold through the holiday season.

Read: The Baby-Sitters Club: Kristy’s Great Idea (Raina Telgemeier. Ann M Martin): I never read the originals, but the graphic novel version is pretty cute and full of period-appropriate landlines.

Read: My Best Friend is Dense Harem Main Character-kun, But Why Am I The Heroine?! (Shintaro Mofujin): I’m usually here for a story about a boy getting turned into a girl, but this one was not great, and I get the feeling she may turn back, so what even is the point?

Written: 839 kitten words.

Oh yeah, I did order Christmas presents for some people. Good job, past me!

Fortunately I was able to reuse the nature fact about tarantulas keeping pet frogs this week, but I definitely need to get some new facts. Maybe dinosaur facts, everybody likes dinosaurs.

Watched: Amphibia 9-10: Apparently there is some structure to this world besides one village surrounded by deadly hazards, and also, there’s clearly going to be doom.

Read: The Tryout (Christina Soontornvat, Joanna Cacao): Semi-autobiographical retelling of the author trying out for middle-school cheerleading squad as a nerdy Thai-American girl in a small Texas town.

Read: “The Difference Between Love and Time” (Catherynne M Valente): The space-time continuum reimagined as a kind of surreal, terrible boyfriend.

Read: Cotton Tales vol 1 (Loputyn): I’m not that familiar with the Gothic genre, but this seems like it: a young boy who has no idea what’s going on or who any of these people are, allegedly because he has amnesia; a huge house with a special tower to keep a mysterious relative in; sinister houseguests; unicorn rabbits that only some people can see, that seem to be at war with each other.

Written: 623 kitten words.

Put a container of precooked vegetables and several sliced-up sausages onto a baking sheet and put it in the over for a while. This counts as cooking N/N?

Read: “Undercover” (Tamsyn Muir): Maybe not necromancy per se, and not space, but lesbians and death and terror and betrayal!

Read: Freestyle (Gale Galligan): Graphic novel about 8th-grade breakdancers in NYC and drama around new friends and school and parents and yo-yos.

Watched: Amphibia 7-8: So basically female frog-people are terrifying. Seems legit.

Written: 670 kitten words.

Back to getting up early, but it was a useful meeting this time.

Watched: Amphibia 5-6: Not really any kind of plot, but who needs a plot when you have snailmobiles?

Read: How To Get A Girlfriend When You’re A Terrifying Monster (Marie Cardno): Apparently the answer is, hang out in your home dimension trying to not get absorbed until an intrepid explorer of fixed yet oddly hot shape shows up and follow her home. Screaming, hiding, and general panic may ensue, but there is a possibility of smooches.

Written: 390 kitten words.

 

Today’s early-morning meeting was cancelled, but I didn’t realize until I was already awake, so I spent the extra hour being useless instead of really sleeping. (But do I ever really sleep? Signs point to no.)

Played: Lancer. Vivian wasn’t able to make it, so we let Ken play TWO mechs since it’s his game after all. That’s probably why we trounced the all-flying team despite none of us being able to fly for more than a couple of rounds. Tinca was appalled that everyone else went,  “secret offworlder underground mech fight ring, okay, seems legit”.

Read: “Touching Divinity” (Benjamin Medrano): It has more than one scene, so I guess it’s technically not a vignette, but it’s very short and pretty much only one thing happens. It is gay, though.

Written: 226 kitten words.

Got my time off for the holiday season sorted. I have a lot of time off from the 23rd through the 2nd, but a few miscellaneous days not off, or not completely off. Should be fine unless we try to go to Roseville or something.

Read: “The Sufficient Loss Protocol” (Kemi Ashing-Giwa): Extremely evil corporate goon vs xenoarchaeology. I know it’s short, so not a lot of characterization, but wanting to stay in bed forever is only relatable, not actually sympathetic.

Read: The Red Scholar’s Wake (Aliette de Bodard): Also conflict in space, but much better. Pirate abductions, a human getting married to a space ship, feelings, corrupt officials, pirate utopia, more feelings, intrigue, ethical debates, family feelings, assorted murders, daring rescues, human-spaceship smooches, all the good stuff.

Written: 278 kitten words.

Got up earlier than I would like for cleaners, but then managed to take a nap and get up a second time to go grocery shopping at a reasonable hour. Then I was a massive lump.

Watched: Amphibia 1-2: Jus recommended I watch it after finishing The Owl House, but I don’t like it as much. I guess I like a world of giant bones and bile magic better than one of human-sized frogs and giant insects. Maybe if there were more insects.

Written: 569 kitten words.

Wait, what happened to November?!

Two nights of fireplace noises has shown that this is not a good sleep aid. I think I need just plain white noise.

Despite my brain being shriveled from excessive dreams, I did three works today.

Read: Beesong Chronicles Omnibus vol 1: Sting & Song, Webs & Words, Hives & Heroism (Benjamin Medrano): For chaos god reasons, some fraction of the giant bees in a LitRPG world turn into beepeople. One of them gets kicked out of her hive, falls in with adventurers fighting against the Demon Lord, and is weird and cute and selfless and murdery and ace and bee-like for three books. The story is complete, but it’s labelled “vol 1” because the author hopes to write more.

Read: Hammered (Lindsay Buroker): A spinoff from the “Death Before Dragons” series, following another half-human Seattle resident who gets mixed up with interdimensional skullduggery when she just wants to renovate houses and have a normal life. Tragic backstory, magic weapons, elf-dwarf romantic tension.

Read: “How I Stole the Princess’s White Knight and Turned Him To Villainy: Miracle 1” (AJ Sherwood): A knight goes to an unlicensed sorcerer to help protect the people from the horrible princess, extravagant flirting ensues. The sorcerer is cute and eccentric in the best tradition of wizards who are so powerful they don’t have to care about dignity.

Watched: The Owl House 2.18-19: Revolt, revolt! OK!

Written: 319 kitten words. Too much reading, not enough writing.

I finally remembered to download an app for noise for sleeping instead of running the fan all night. Crackling fireplace noise was pleasant, but I don’t know how much it actually helped.

Watched: The Owl House 2.15-17: Flashbacks and also concrete information about King’s past. I was right about Belos.

Written: 170 kitten words, bringing me to around 12000 words for the month. That’s not as bad as I thought, even though most of them were not NaNoWriMo.