Author: Trip the Space Parasite

Everybody is usually pretty zombified by the third day of a con, and we had a bonus Fire Alarm Incident at 1am, so today was not a bright or energetic day. I got into a Slugblaster game in Games on Demand, which is something that I’ve wanted to play for a while since it looks like the new generation’s TFOS. There were only two players and the GM was kind of out of it, but we did get to stream us doing skateboard tricks in another dimension while a giant robot launched from a silo, and isn’t that what it’s all about?

The afternoon game was a playtest and apparently the previous run of it showed too many problems, so it got switched to a different in-development game, Gallant. This put off some of the players so again it was only two of us and a GM, but we buckled the swashes and retrieved the stolen documents from the vile Comte. This game’s mechanical gimmick is that you need to decide on three things you want to accomplish each turn, and then once you’ve rolled your pile of d8s, you have to assign them to the three goals, so you may get any combination of success, mixed success, and failure. When it comes out, I will probably buy it for Jeremy, because he is all about swashbuckling in fake France. No idea when that might be, though.

And that was it! I trundled back home and was very blargh.

Read: Gahi-chan! vol 1 (Tirotata): Tentacled yōkai that eat human art to take the shape of the characters therein could be interesting even if lewd, but here it’s just lewd.

Read: Hot Reset (Elliott Kay): Extremely male-fantasy space opera about a down-on-his-luck guy who uses the power of not being a complete dick to get a harem of hot, bi, poly girls and a sweet spaceship, and also blow up the bad guys and save the day.

Written: FAIL.

Oddly, getting up at 7 isn’t any better the second time. It probably doesn’t help that DDP is one of the things I forgot to bring.

This session’s players were less energetic, and I was not up to making up for that, so less fun was had today than yesterday. I did not manage to keep everyone engaged, and also did not learn anything from yesterday’s experience. Plus I forgot how random DW combat is, so the wooden boar running roughshod over the party yesterday was no indicator of future performance. It was still better than not gaming, but not by as much as anyone would like.

Since my evening game started at 18:00, I decided to skip the 14-18 slot in favor of napping. This left me time to get dinner, but I ended up not bothering. I also perused the dealer’s corner, but I mostly don’t want physical books any more. Sorry, publishers of indie games!

The evening slot was Leverage, with the twist that we were helping people who had been screwed over by a corrupt superhero. Because right was on our side, we made pretty much every roll for the whole game, even against the security guard who had a d10 gut telling him something was hinky and the d12 superhero. I was playing the tiny thief, so I got to sneak into the bank data center through the HVAC ducts that no one could possibly fit through, and then later into the museum to get an old costume for the grifter to impersonate the superhero in front of his coconspirators. It was obviously not as smooth as real Leverage caper, but we had to do it in one pass with no revisions, so I think it turned out pretty well all things considered.

Despite my nap, I didn’t mind ending before the scheduled time of midnight.

I set my alarm for 7 and that turned out to be a good move because I was so slow-moving that I would not have made my 9:00 game if I had slept much later.

As usual, I did a terrible job of GMing, with bonus failure in the context of a 4-hour slot, but people had fun anyway, probably because it was the first gaming slot of the con and everyone was still hyped up and full of sleep. They gave me backstory hooks that I could weave in, too. Everyone seemed happy with One Shot World over regular Dungeon World, so I think I’ll stick with it next year if nothing better comes along. I would still prefer something FitD, but it’s not like that would make up for my deficiencies.

After lunch, I played an in-development game called In Her Footsteps (PbtA, but there are only four moves so we just had a rating in each of them instead of separate stats) with a bunch of nice and very gay ladies. We started by making a magical world, which ended up being a river delta that was a crossroads to many worlds of varying levels of magic, then made witches to inhabit that world, and finally had to deal with refugees from one of those worlds bringing us a horrible hungry curse. We got everything sorted, though, and the overworked chairwitch got a hot date with the witch we revivified. (Not my character, I was a giant beaver of lurking comfortably in mist and darkness.)

Evening game was Hello, World, criminal shenanigans in a mysterious virtual universe FitD. It seems to have a lot of lore, most of which we skipped over, but we ended up being catspaws in a three-way conflict among criminal factions, luring one into a trap while they were doing crimes during a surveillance outage and then betraying them. However, while setting up clocks, the GM mentioned all the terrible things previous groups had done to the opposing bruiser, and our bruiser decided we should defeat her with smooches. The climactic showdown ended up being “let’s you and him step outside and fight” while the PCs tried to keep things under control and arrange the collapse of the partially-restored-from-backup building to trap the two bruisers together. It all worked out in the end!

Will buy Hello, World when I get back to my computer, and In Her Footsteps when it comes out (and not just because the GM so kindly shared her It’s-Its with us).

I did not manage to do anything at all useful today. I stayed in bed reading until well after noon, and didn’t leave the apartment all day. That would be fine if I were just vegatating for my vacation, but I should be getting ready to go to Big Bad Con tomorrow. I guess making sure my vaccination record is packed and also taking a picture of it counts as prep, but only barely. Fortunately I don’t have to be there until tomorrow afternoon.

Read: Bonds of Blood and Alpha Strike (Terry Mixon, JN Chaney): Having finally gotten their giant space battleship moving, the heroes now have to do extremely unwise stuff with it, so the opponents this time are mostly physics and time, with a bunch of politics and crime and even a little space combat.

Read: “Haley and the Spooky Dungeon” (Maggie Hogarth): Well, what kind of dungeon do you make at Halloween, if not a haunted house?

Watched: Star vs the Forces of Evil 4.11-12: That wasn’t suspicious at all, Eclipsa. Also, did Marco just deprive Mewni of most of its knights?

Written: More pointless notes, nothing else.

It’s like Friday, except I have to get all my customer cases in order to hand off to other people while I’m out. Also I had to get up too early for the weekly meeting.

Watched: Star vs the Forces of Evil 4.8-10: All Mewni politics all the time! Except the callback to when Marco and Star started getting shipped.

Read: The Last Hunter (Terry Mixon, JN Chaney): It’s a Missiles In Space setting, but the enemies for most of the book are neglect, corruption, and logistics. Points off for society, gender roles, etc being very C20, but still entertaining.

Written: More gaming notes, I guess. They’re very stupid and my game will be awful, though.

Just because we could, we gathered at Ayse and Ken’s place to eat delicious lamb date stuff and cake and tell Ayse happy birthday some more. Also we watched the antepenultimate episode of Sailor Moon Stars and clobbered people with rubber balls.

Watched: Sailor Moon Stars 198: Everybody’s dead, next two episodes will just be drifting petals and sad music.

Written: Nothing, although I made a few notes for the con.

Today, the one thing I managed to accomplish was printing out character sheets and move references for the con. There’s still some folding that needs to happen, but together with the pens and pencils and index cards, I think the player supplies are sorted. If I were clever, I would have gotten dice, but it’s way too late for that now.

Watched: Star vs the Forces of Evil 4.5-7: Gee, it’s almost as if restitution isn’t popular with the colonizers. But Kelly seems pretty cool.

Read: Black & White: Tough Love At The Office vol 1 (Sal Jiang): Up-and-coming corporate rivals Shirakawa and Kuroda have to work together while plotting against each other, but when they’re working late, their rivalry devolves into fist-fights and extremely rough lesbian sex. It’s not really my kink, but I’m hoping they’ll get married and become masked avengers beating up all the high-ranking men in the corporate world, or something like that.

Written: 370 kitten words.

I was 1000% useless and didn’t make it to Jus’s soccer game. I didn’t even manage to go grocery shopping until the afternoon, when things are sold out and the store is crowded. Also some badly-trained fraud-allegation algorithm decided only a criminal would try to buy books after noon and I had to waste a bunch of time waiting for my card to get turned back on, and that put me into the time when the bus was late and generally the whole experience was slower and stupider and less successful than planned. And that’s all I managed to do today, other than play FrogComPosBand until a million o’clock at night.

Read: Orbs of Wisdom (Lindsay Buroker): Sixth and last of the “Dragon Gate” series. All the major threats got dealt with, all the couples (sadly all het) got HEAed, the end. Always good when Science is the solution, though.

Written: FAIL.

I did not have to get up earlier than usual today, but I still had to get up. Hmph.

Watched: Star vs the Forces of Evil 4.2-4: Now we know more about Eclipsa’s moral compass.

Read: Hitomi-chan is Shy With Strangers vol 5 (Chorisuke Natsumi): A very slice-of-life volume in which not much happens except that Usa finds Hitomi’s hotness very distracting.

Written: 316 kitten words.

Had to get up early and go into the office today so we could have a team lunch with boss3 S. The office was just as hot and inconveniently located as usual, but I was able to hide in a conference most of the time and mostly avoid humans and their virus-spewing face-holes. I also drank canned coffee milkshake stuff that was probably very bad for me.

Apparently boss3 is persona non grata in Switzerland after running afoul of their draconian anti-speeding regime, which I would not have known if I hadn’t come into the office today.

I cleverly (not really) got pizza on the way home and watched TV with Marith, which was definitely better than being in an office.

Watched: Mob Psycho 100 3.1-2: Uh oh, Mob is thinking about his future. That can’t be good for Reigen’s business!

Read: Fluff (RavensDagger): LitRPG but superhero instead of D&D. An extremely anxious and repressed college freshman gets superpowers, gets randomly assigned to be a straight-up villain, and discovers that her power is summon little sisters who have actual powers. It’s all sideways from there.

Written: 214 kitten words.

Had to get up early for another meeting, although at least this one isn’t repeating. It also wasn’t that useful, possibly because I reject the very notion of being a leader.

Watched: Helluva Boss 2.2, 1.0-5: Ugh, the new episode, although probably beloved of Loovia fans, is not at all good. Did the new writer even watch the preceding episodes? I had to go back and rewatch some to remember just how sordid and bizarre and hyper it’s supposed to be.

Read: Komi Can’t Communicate vol 21 (Tomohito Oda): Komi abroad! A little more of Komi and Rumiko’s friendship, but not one of the more exciting volumes.

Written: 636 kitten words, somehow.

The meeting that used to be in the late morning on Monday is now before the day starts on Tuesday, and is more interesting (this time) but less useful. Pretty sure I don’t approve.

Played: Lancer. Boss fight! Arguably Vivian’s character won the fight by ignoring the opponent and disrupting its power source instead, which worked better than my character mugging the person who set in motion. At least we got to give her drugs.

Read: Chapter 9 of “Rodeo Clown“: Awww!

Written: FAIL.

Ate so much banana bread today. Also cheese.

Played: Dark Matter episode 5. As usual, Jeremy apologized for not having an adventure and then it was pretty great. This time, our hapless PCs met two new factions (the Bridge Crew and the Librarian, who is a faction all by herself), were almost eaten by spiders, accidentally damaged several books, were almost eaten by kobolds and alligators, seized a plasma launcher +1 for one of the gadgeteers to integrate into their exoskeleton, and brought a book back to the library in triumph. LEVEL UP. One of my characters finds the Librarian horrifying and thinks she’s probably a system of oppression all by herself, the other finds her moderately terrifying but apparently is into that. Next session, they have shake down the door guards for late library books and also go to the Farm to get materials to repair the books that were damaged in the Great Spider Fight. Also there was banana bread.

Watched: Star vs the Forces of Evil 3.21, 4.1: That was arguably the right thing for Star to do, but I think they’re treating the legitimacy of the monarchy as more of a thing than it deserves.

Written: 565 kitten words.

How is it already only Friday? Why have I not accomplished anything all week?

Read: “Haley’s Cozy System Armageddon” and “Haley and the Catfish Invasion” (Maggie Hogarth): Aliens wander by and transform Earth into a LitRPG world complete with information popups, so one young woman does the best she can with calligraphy and cooking in her small town and gets a class not usually seen in LitRPG stories. CW: overt Christianity.

Written: 268 kitten words.

Thursday the 13th, most cursed of– wait, that’s not right. It’s just Thursday, although it is also only a couple of weeks until I have to run Dungeon World for strangers who will hate me. I should also get ready for NaNoWriMo and probably more stuff that I’m forgetting now.

Written: 643 kitten words. Not really a lot, except compared to recent days. Putting the Shop Titans pad in the other room just makes me look at monsters on artstation instead, but perhaps that is less disruptive.

I’m pretty sure I should have been smarter today.

Played: Lancer. We finished off the mysterious mechs from last time, who did not yield any more information, and then tried to help Kelsey recreate the mech that Comp/Con ate. Despite the number of people helping, she eventually succeeded, and we all stomped up to the boss fight together.

Read: Obie Is Man Enough (Schuyler Bailar): Slice of life about a Korean-American trans boy who just wants to live his 7th-grade life and swim competitively, but extreme asshats keep trying to stop him. He does triumph in the end, but man, people suck. (Author is also a trans guy, so presumably the transphobia is realistic or even toned down.)

Written: FAIL.

Happy happy Marith Day!

We celebrated by going over to Monkeycat Towers to eat Thai food and watch the first three episodes of Revue Starlight. The Thai food was delicious, the anime was not what we expected. Things it reminded us of include: Revolutionary Girl Utena, Kaleido Star, Princess Tutu, Star Driver, AKB0048, and Strawberry Panic. It is of the inherently cursed yuri-for-boys genre, and also seems to rely on knowing the characters from other parts of the sprawling multimedia franchise, so we probably don’t need to watch any more.

Read: Crusade (Glynn Stewart): Completes the trilogy with Exile and Refuge. The humans and their friends defeat the great enemy with the power of archaeology, while also dealing with first contact with assholes.

Written: 348 kitten words.

I did manage to go grocery shopping, eventually, but that’s about all I accomplished today.

Watched: Star vs the Forces of Evil 3.9: Okay, those princesses weren’t so terrible. That time.

Read: Exile and Refuge (Glynn Stewart): First two of a series I had not previously read, seem like earlier works. Dissidents and rebels have to set up their own society on an unknown but suspiciously habitable world and deal with all the things they find in their new section of the galaxy.

Written: 424 kitten words. I need to get my act together for NaNoWriMo, though.

I meant to get up early and go grocery shopping in plenty of time for going to see Jus’s soccer game, but none of that came to pass. Then I was on call all afternoon, and customers rudely wanted me to fix their problems. It wasn’t intense work, but anything else beyond pad games and light reading wouldn’t have worked well anyway. Bah.

I didn’t have anything else I wanted to sign up for, so I forgot, but the final round of signups for Big Bad Con was tonight. I’m up to four people in my Friday session and five in my Saturday session, so I better get this glass mountain filled with [SPOILER] and [SPOILER] and DOOM.

I don’t know whether it was the weird mayo-chicken-salad filling of the arepa I ate tonight or the ranch dressing I put on my chicken nuggets last night, but for a bit it looked like it was going to be a sad night. Fortunately it cleared out quickly and I did not have to spend the night with my forehead on the cool bathroom counter.

Read: Spy x Family vol 8 (Tatsuya Endo): An army of hit men trapped on a cruise ship with Yor. That’s definitely going to end poorly for someone.

Watched: Star vs the Forces of Evil 3.4-8: Wait, wasn’t that the end? No, apparently Marco has to be a doofus and also the writers have to ship him with Star for no good reason. Hmph.

Written: 330 kitten words.

Huh, Friday.

Watched: Star vs the Forces of Evil 2.22, 3.1-3: No more hanging around Echo Creek having teenaged hijinx, it’s all Mewni adventure now! Also, new opening and closing and more tadpoles.

Read: Chapter 8 of “Rodeo Clown“: No death can be so impending that Blitzo and Stolas will keep their pants on.

Written: 274 kitten words. Remember when my daily goal was 250 and I made it almost every day? Me neither.

How is it already only Thursday? Why has nothing useful happened this entire week?

Read: The Genesis of Misery (Neon Yang): Star travel and mecha based on mysterious artifacts and substances, excellent. Declaring them holy, making a Catholic-style religion around them, and murdering everybody who regards them in a different light… yep, humans suck. In fact, almost all the characters are pretty terrible, including the MC. Sure, she honestly believes that she’s the next messiah, but everyone around her believes it too, and history shows us how that goes. It looks like the next book will be a lot more about her enemies, which honestly seem somewhat less terrible, so I’ll probably read it.

Watched: Star vs the Forces of Evil 2.18-21: There’s starting to be more plot, not just wackiness.

Written: 383 kitten words.

Got up early for a training that was cancelled at some earlier date, only the external vendor was too incompetent to remove it from the calendar. I’m sure the training will miraculously be a good use of my time when it finally happens, though.

Watched: Star vs the Forces of Evil 2.16-17: So all of that experience Marco gained is just dropped between episodes? At least he gets to get rid of the mark of Hekapoo along with it. Which is too bad, Hekapoo seems like quite a catch.

Written: 677 kitten words.

It’s a good thing that Ken is too busy having fun in Portland to game, because I got stuck at work forever. I think we need to explain to New Guy M about knocking off when shift is over. But maybe he’s angling for a management position, which does require working 24/7.

Watched: Star vs the Forces of Evil 2.13-15: Wow, actual progress! And not just in Ludo’s evil plan!

Read: Yashahime vol 1 (Takashi Shiina, Rumiko Takahashi): The daughters of the major characters of Inu-Yasha have adventures. Unfortunately I either didn’t watch far enough or wasn’t invested enough in the original series to care deeply.

Written: FAIL.

Tried to sign up for more Big Bad Con events, but as usual, their backend was not up to handling a few hundred requests in the same minute. It took about 45 minutes to get things sorted, but I got into the Leverage-only-getting-revenge-for-non-supers. It was enough of a mess that I should wait until tomorrow before obsessively checking to see if anyone signed up for my games.

Watched: Star vs the Forces of Evil 2.12: Disembodied flying unicorn heads are kind of the worst.

Written: FAIL. I still don’t know how to do horrible revelations. Or feelings.

I realized today that ice cream costs like a dollar an ounce at the ice cream place. But, ice cream!

Played: Dark Matter episode 4. Beat up more undead that were minding their own business, had drinks with another underdead who was minding his own business but very politely, went back to the first faction to try to broker a swap but they had too many yellow question marks, set out for the library and got ambushed by the faction that everybody hates. Jeremy told me to draw a battlemap like that time Obi-wan and Whatsisface got jumped by Darth Maul, and all I remembered of the scene was that it made me think of live-action Roborally so I drew a bunch of catwalks and moving platforms and pneumatic tubes and waterfalls of molten metal. It was difficult to justify being in the bowels of an asteroid ship (ammunition manufacturing?) but made for a great fight scene. It might have been more glorious if I had remembered Bolt gets to reroll natural 1s, but it all worked out in the end.

Watched: Star vs the Forces of Evil 2.9-11: Disembodied flying unicorn heads are kind of the worst.

Written: 575 kitten words.

Jus is now a teenager, so she got enormous quantities of sushi, and then we went back for cake and presents. The clear winner was signed original art and pins and stuff from the creator of one of her favorite webcomics. Did I have feelings that strong when I was 13? Then we played some Super Mario Party and dispersed, because Jus and Nonny and Ayse and Ken have to get organized to leave for Portland tomorrow.

Written: FAIL.