Author: Trip the Space Parasite

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.

Rachel is apparently feeling much better, so we had gaming.

Played: Dark Matter. We had a fight with a bunch of different poison AoEs in a confined space, but survived by letting the least-aggressive demons watch their movie in peace. In fact we even won, although our vampire buddy might have been permanently corrupted by cinematic torture. He was very grateful and gave us paper to use for books to try to bribe the dragon with. (The paper we made from the evil mushrooms was also evil.) But then it was revealed that one of the four Maguffins was with the Mad Max faction and the demons knew, so after getting healed of the demonic afflictions, we headed over there and arrived just in time to enter the race.

Written: 235.

I thought I had nothing scheduled for today, so I lay abed for a million hours, but then I found out it’s Minecraft day! I made my shopping trip extra-short so I could make it to Monkeycat Towers by 14:00, and we crafted some mines. Literally, I think we all spent most of the afternoon underground. I found a cave with a spider spawner and a treasure chest, but that was all there was to it, so I started delving into the depths of the cartesian coordinate system, and found some coal and iron but also a vast underground realm with way too many surprise pits over lava. I put a door on it to keep the endermen from getting out and started a new minestair, but maybe I should go back and work on building walkways over the pits. I have iron pickaxes, so in theory I should be able to mine better stuff than coal and iron that far down.

I wonder if it would be any fun to play Minecraft on my own.

Written: FAIL.

Staying indoors and never interacting with humans is a good way to avoid holiday nonsense.

Today’s meeting fact: Lizards can’t breath while they run, since they have to bend side to side, so their endurance is pretty limited. Boss²’s lizard Smaug was on the call, so I had to clarify that dragons are special lest he take offense.

Read: Homicidal Aliens Are Invading and All I Got Is This Stat Menu (JJ Ackerknecht): Pretty much what it says on the tin. Enigmatic aliens provide select humans with superpowers via a video-game interface to fight off murdery aliens. Basically the backstory to Stray Cat Strut, but just our regular cyberpunk dystopia, not a future one.

Written: 220.

Yay, customer meetings. No, wait, not “yay”, the other one.

Read: MonsTABOO vol 2 (Yuya Takahashi, TALI): Wow, that was brutal. Next volume starts the revenge tragedy, I guess!

Read: “Unseelie Brothers, Ltd.” (Fran Wilde): Faerie fashion plus labor rights, although only snacking on the rich.

Read: “The Sin of America” (Catherynne M Valente): More literal scapegoating than our media seems to prefer, but not that different.

Read: “Proof by Induction” (Jose’ Pablo Iriarte): I see why the story is written that way, but I’m not sure that would actually be a one-use technology.

Written: Still FAIL.

I did not eat delicious pie today. I did some work, though. Customers, manne.

Played: Lancer. We almost didn’t play because of power outages, but PG&E came through for Dave. Ken was busy packing for a business trip, so next week he will be very surprised at where Tinca could not talk the PCs out of ending up.

Read: The Grief of Stones (Katherine Addison): Second of the spin-off from The Goblin Emperor about the detective-priest who gets mixed up in the most appalling schemes. This time: the depravity of photographs!

Written: Continued FAIL.

Work was not particularly more annoying, but Monday the 13th is definitely inauspicious.

Read: Revealed (DI Freed): Second in the series about a girl who starts off with no martial arts powers and then starts becoming increasingly OP for unclear reasons. Also she remains mostly not a jerk, at least compared to most martial artists. This book, she goes to martial arts death college, now with 32% more murders.

Written: FAIL.

Grocery shopping worked so well yesterday that I was able to sleep in until it was time to get ready to play Minecraft. Then I went over and played Minecraft and did not die hardly at all. Also we had a barbecue and stayed up partying and fighting off zombies all night. I still don’t dare go underground yet, but I chopped down a bunch of trees and dug up a bunch of sand and stuff. Then we logged out and ate Thai food.

Read: The Ascension Game vol 1 (Ace Arriande): LitRPG apparently based on some game that’s like Minecraft with more boss fights, but I’m pretty sure the ridiculous smut parts were added later. They do not help.

Written: FAIL.

Slept in forever, but then went grocery shopping in the afternoon and miraculously it worked out! The store was full, but things were not particularly sold out. In fact, I was able to stock up on the bird meat that’s usually out of stock.

Read: Backpacking Through Bedlam (Seanan McGuire): Alice, having finally found her long-lost husband in the depths of the multiverse in the previous book, finally gets him home and straight into a war with the monster-killers their family defected from. Alice’s choices continue to be pretty questionable.

Written: FAIL.

Was I smart today? Only vaguely, I think. Mostly I read Nebula nominees, and probably didn’t appreciate them enough.

Watched: My Hero Academia 6.16-17: Backstory for Hawks, additional backstory for the Todorokis. I understand that regulating parenthood would be nothing but wall-to-wall abuse, but some people really should not be allowed to reproduce.

Read: Wild Massive (Scotto Moore): Artificial multiverse, colonization/assimilation, genocide, theme parks, revenge, sufficiently-advanced sorcery, unethical experimentation, higher powers, sufficiently-advanced technology, mayhem, shenanigans, narrative warfare, and no romance. It was a pretty wild ride.

Read: “If You Find Yourself Speaking to God, Address God with the Informal You” (John Chu): An actor meets basically-Superman in his secret ID at the gym. Slice of life.

Read: “Two Hands, Wrapped in Gold” (SB Divya): I figured out which fairytale this was as soon as we saw the MC’s full name, but I don’t think it was supposed to be a puzzle, just less Eurocentric.

Read: “The Prince of Salt and the Ocean’s Bargain” (Natalia Theodoridou): Original fairytale with a  modern sensibility.

Read: “Rabbit Test” (Samantha Mills): I really hope Christian fuckfaces aren’t still going to be denying women reproductive freedom in a hundred years…

Read: “Your Eyes, My Beacon: Being an Account of Several Misadventures and How I Found My Way Home” (CL Clark): Kind of Beauty and the Beast, but sapphic and there’s a lighthouse and it’s different.

Read: “The Calcified Heart of Saint Ignace Battiste” (Christopher Caldwell): Young priest spies on a spooky ritual in Spookytown and learns that the orthodoxy is a lie.

Read: “The Goldfish Man” (Maureen McHugh): Homeless lady has a hard life for a while and then meets a strange person on the streets.

Read: “Ribbons” (Natalia Theodoridou): Another modernish fairytale, in a world where fairytale things happen. Not sure what the ribbon is a metaphor for — there’s already plenty of queerness.

Read: “This Village” (Eugenia Triantafyllou): Welcome to Wicked Witch Town.

Read: “The Coward Who Stole God’s Name” (John Wiswell): The most beloved man in the world reveals his true self to a reporter. Chaos almost doesn’t ensue. Read to me like a direct commentary on celebrity/billionaire adulation.

Written: FAIL.

New boss definitely likes to talk a lot more in meetings than old boss.

Played: Lancer. I think we got through three whole rounds of combat this time.

Read: Beauty and the Besharam (Lillie Vale): An Indian-American girl who absolutely refuses to shut up, downplay her talents, or otherwise be modest, and her childhood friend/rival have extremely intense feelings over the summer between junior and senior year.

Read: Lazy Dragon Queen vol 6 (Ace Arriande): Even more ridiculous and somewhat lewd, to make up for the strange inclusions of seriousness.

Written: FAIL.