Author: Trip the Space Parasite

Since Lancer was cancelled due to some kind of unspeakable plague situation, I stayed in bed forever reading like a huge useless lump of dumbness. Then I had regrets.

I did take my stupid mental and physical health for a stupid walk while it was still light out, but I came back with (possibly uncursed) frogurt and ordered a pizza, so that’s probably not a win.

Read: The Witch and the Beast vol 7 (Kousuke Satake): Still in Vampiretown, still embroiled in vampire murder-politics, vampires are still unprepared for what Gideau and Ashaf are going to do to them.

Read: Charming As A Verb (Ben Phillipe): A Black immigrant boy in NYC hustles and schmoozes his way through life so he can graduate with top marks from his fancy private school and get into his first-choice university, but then he’s a massive dumbass. He is charming (when he’s not being a dumbass), but his girlfriend is way cooler than him.

Watched: The Owl House 3-4: Oh, I guess there is a magic school after all. And now I know where that bit from the fan comic comes from.

Words: 551 kitten words.

Jus and Ayse have to go ziplining tomorrow, so Jus and Ken had to play D&D today, so there was no Zoomwarts or anime. Unrelatedly, my gaming for tomorrow is also cancelled.

For no detectable reason, my ankle decided to start hurting like I had twisted it, in response to checks notes sitting down for 15 minutes. Also my esophagus jammed for several minutes. I guess I got “Roll twice and suffer both results” on the Wandering Decrepitude Table.

Eaten: Chicken stuff. Also kohlrabi-carrot stuff and dinosaur kale.

Played: Pool Noodle Battle Royale. Treachery is mandatory.

Watched: RWBY 1.5. I had forgotten that Blake and Yang were the first to meet each other’s eyes. Also Ruby and Weiss, of course.

Words: 529 kitten words. No revisings.

No terrible pranks on my Internet, which is good, because I wouldn’t have been smart enough to avoid falling for them.

Read: Dragonbreath: Curse of the Were-wiener (Ursula Vernon): Further adventures of fearful dragon and sensible iguana. Apparently the potato salad from the first book was completely canon.

Read: Dragonbreath: Lair of the Bat Monster (Ursula Vernon): Apparently the local bus system also serves the depths of the Mexican rainforest, much to the iguana’s dismay.

Read: Dragonbreath: No Such Thing As Ghosts (Ursula Vernon): Of course, the skeptical lizard also doesn’t believe in dragons or lycanthropy, so possibly she’s in the wrong setting. Can’t dispute that bullies have been empirically demonstrated to exist, though.

Words: 335 kitten words, which I guess is technically more than zero.

Had to get up early so I could commute and wear a mask all day and watch people booze it up and not be able to properly collaborate with my teammates. If I were still a useless post-college git, maybe I’d be impressed by free food, but apparently I’m a grownup now.

Played: Eclipse Phase 2. I did not contribute much, but at least a Navy Puke got fragged.

Read: Rare Swords Are Only Good Until You Lose Them (August): Third in the series, MC is still OP, although he’s burning through his reserves. Also, we finally find out what Elsa’s deal is.

Read: Stars and Steam (Anthea Sharp): Five short stories, not much more than vignettes, in a universe where aliens give humans advanced technology on the condition they can make their society stable, by which they mean Queen Victoria always rules (and apparently mores never change).

Read: The Field Guide To The North American Teenager (Ben Phillipe): A black French Canadian teenager moves to Austin, where he hates everything at first, which understandably makes him kind of a jerk. Sadly, he both stays kind of a jerk even after making friends, and leaves written evidence, so then he gets a comeuppance.

Read: Catch These Hands vol 1 (murata): Years after they were high-school delinquent rivals, two women meet again, and it turns out the one that had a crush on the other still does, so they start dating. It seems very Japanese in that dating is purely a social status, almost no visible affection. Also hardly anything happens.

Words: FAIL.

Eaten: Delivery sushi, which is not as great as fresh sushi, but still very luxurious.

Watched: Amerivision, part 2! I think agree with Dave that the songs this week were slicker than last week, but the Oregon guys had proper Eurovision spirit.

Read: “Girl Oil” (Grace P Fong): Social expectations about Chinese diaspora women + magic beautifying potion with side effects = tragedy.

Read: “The Last Truth” (AnaMaria Curtis): A thief has to sacrifice her memories to open locks. Funny how her contract is almost up at the same time there’s almost nothing left…

Words: FAIL. No time to write, must get up early tomorrow.

Read: The Best Thing You Can Steal (Simon R Green): Doesn’t seem to explicitly be a “Nightside” novel, but it’s very much in the same Green genre with people on the lam from both Heaven and Hell and whatnot. A thief puts together a heist against a terrible collector of powerful artifacts, without telling his team the entirety of the plan (as is traditional for masterminds).

Read: Lumberjanes vol 1 (Noelle Stevenson, Grace Ellis, Shannon Watters, Brooke Allen): Summer camp with yeti, lake monsters, underground complexes full of traps and logic puzzles, and general eccentricity. Makes little sense, but is very charming!

Read: Dragonbreath (Ursula Vernon): Adventures of an elementary-school dragon who has much more imagination than sense, and his long-suffering iguana sidekick.

Read: Dragonbreath: Attack Of The Ninja Frogs (Ursula Vernon): Further adventures, with ninjas and samurai. Apparently dragons get the special bus pass.

Read: “Synthetic Perennial” (Vivianni Glass): Oddly, people have strong feelings about being brought back to life, and also about other people being brought back to life.

Read: “Hush” (Mary Anne Mohanraj): A human acts in a non-racist fashion, even though she doesn’t have to, even though she could easily hate aliens, even though it puts her at risk.

Words: 408 kitten words, a little revision.

Another morning? Already? WTF, time!

Despite that, I was vaguely successful at work. I think this test plan for the new system could have been done better, though.

Read: Lovesick Ellie vol 1 (Fujimomo): High school romance between a socially invisible girl who tweets “lurid” fantasies about her really hot, popular classmate, and the boy who is secretly misanthropic. They do at least get to the point of going on a date by the end of the first volume instead of dragging on not acknowledging their feelings for a thousand pages, but I don’t care that much.

Words: 711 kitten words and a tiny bit of revision.

I was awake before noon, although I sat on the edge of my bed being useless for a while longer. Eventually I did manage to go to Target and buy new towels and pillow cases because I suddenly decided my existing ones were too old and grotty. I even did some grocery shopping. Mostly I was super-useless, though.

Read: “Fireheart Tiger” (Aliette de Bodard): Lesbian princess love triangle in the face of colonial politics. I feel like there wasn’t enough attention to the protagonist figuring out her feelings, although maybe she was supposed to be kind of feckless?

Words: 351 kitten words.

Cleaners came at 7:00 this morning, so I had to get up, but then I took a nap thing, or maybe was just a huge useless lump for a while. I managed to shop for a grocery and then visit friends to get hugs, though.

Played: Zoomwarts. Bella isn’t dead, nobody is a vampire (although Emily is also not alive), the ministry is taking credit for saving the day, the surviving eight and a half students are going on winter break early, everyone else has been sucked into a pit to the underworld. Maybe we’ll stop here and let Ken run D&D so Nonny can fight monsters, or maybe Bella and Rosamund and the lizards will have to go get everyone’s soul back.

Eaten: Tasty kebabs, tasty feta-cucumber salad, tasty chocolate splenda cream pie. But we do also love Ken for himself! Really!

Watched: Love, Chunibyo & Other Delusions 1.9: No parasol will protect Rikka from Nibutani talking about feelings!

Watched: Azumanga Daioh 1: Still ridiculous! Also, the fluffy temptation of wheat.

Watched: RWBY 1.4: Sproing!

Played: Zombie ball tag. If a zombie catches a human, they turn into a zombie, but if a zombie gets hit by the ball three times, they turn into a human. Seemed to be reasonably well-balanced in that sometimes the humans won and sometimes the zombies. Also not nearly as contentious as Sneaky Statues.

Words: 554 kitten words about nothing in particular.

Not very clever today, but did some stuff anyway.

Played: Eclipse Phase 2. We had to stop early because Nonny was exploding, but there was time for Nom’s eyeball to grow legs and scuttle for freedom. Also the LT has bottomed out on SAN, but how do you even tell with an officer?

Read: Aposimz vol 5-6 (Tsutomu Nihei): I guess it’s always important to have a nihilist faction as well as the evil empire and an increasing rag-tag band of rebels.

Words: Finally finished that one paragraph of revision. Getting close to being able to show it to people?

Today I had like four or five hours of meetings, but they were relatively productive, and also I could take them from home, without a mask or humans or commute.

Read: In The Vanishers’ Palace (Aliette de Bodard): The gods used their sufficiently advanced magic to play with the world until all the fun leaked out, then vanished. In the haunted, plagued, post-apocalyptic dystopia, a young woman of no particular accomplishments gets traded to a dragon in exchange for someone important in her village. The dragon and her home and the job she gives her new slave are both better and worse and stranger than expected.

Read: Aposimz vol 4 (Tsutomu Nihei): So much collateral damage. It’s clear the emperor’s goal is not to conquer territory or human population, though.

Words: 510 kitten words and a tiny bit of revision.

Had to go into the office today, which was definitely less good than working from home, except that apparently it made my boss’s boss’s boss happy to have us all there. Since we had to unmask to eat lunch together, presumably the entire team has Covid now.

I did make it home at a reasonable time, but then was completely useless.

Read: The Babysitters Coven (Kate Williams): A high-school girl discovers she has magic powers, which does not thrill her, especially when she finds out they come with obligations and sketchy new friends and doom. The magic system/cosmology is as incoherent as you’d find on TV, alas.

Read: “The Terracotta Bride” (Zen Cho): Reread, because somehow I didn’t record it the first time. A robot girl comes to the household of a rich man in an Asian afterlife, and chaos ensues.

Read: KNiP #1-220 (Sarah Simon-Blum): Cute comic about a small saucer alien who has to study humans and do jobs, but really just wants to wear pretty dresses and avoid anxiety-inducing things like human politics and retail work.

Words: 508 kitten words, I guess.

I took off work today, because my managers keep telling me to take more time off, and it seems as good an excuse for a holiday as any. Ayse insisted on taking me to kittens and lunch; how was I supposed to resist? The kittens were very rambunctious, which made it hard to befriend them, but they were adorable anyway.

I went home to vegetate for a while, and then went to Ayse and Ken’s for delicious Thai food and friendship and non-cursed frogurt and then Amerivision. It was actually Eurovisiontastic, despite our worries! Not all the acts understood how to use the stage, and there were a probably excessive number of half-dressed backup dancers, but overall it was properly campy and had a good variety. Oklahoma K-pop was good, the pink one with the keytar solo was good, fire was good, cowboy boot rap was just weird. There were some technical difficulties and I stayed up too late, but it was lots of fun. Nonny also got to stay up late.

Words: FAIL. I meant to do some writing during the afternoon, but instead I did pretty much nothing. It was not an auspicious start, but it was very on-brand.

I can get up on time when people expect me to be at the place to do the thing.

Played: Lancer. We defeated the Engineering Mutants and their pet abomination, by the simple expedient of barbecuing them all when they wouldn’t communicate, and some of the things that came through the malfunctioning Blinkgate. The other things we managed to delay in their incomprehensible purpose until we could unplug the console they were trying to use to reset the Blinkgate, and then get xenolinguists who have spent their entire careers waiting for this opportunity to talk to them. I’m sure there will be no consequences.

Watched: The Owl House 1-2. It was not what I was expecting, which I guess means I was expecting the wrong thing.

Read: Aposimz vol 3 (Tsutomu Nihei): Ugh, allies! Also, apparently there are no animals on this artificial world, only robots with edible parts. That’s very on-brand.

Words: 508 kitten words.

Realized it would be better to go grocery shopping on Monday, since I don’t need workday lunches until Wednesday. Stayed in bed until noon.

The sky is doing us a precipitate. I approve.

Ayse and Ken and family had some kind of human socialization thing, so we went over so late there wasn’t any Zoomwarts or anime, but there was food and hugs.

Eaten: Pulled pork sandwiches! Also salad and beets and fennel and hugs.

Played: Assorted running-around games.

Read: Aposimz vol 2 (Tsutomu Nihei): Main character is getting more allies, some of whom might eventually even like him. Also, many more shockwaves.

Words: 421 sad kitten words.

Working from home is definitely much better in every way.

Read: Be Prepared (Vera Brosgol): Semi-autobiographical graphic novel about a 9-year-old Russian-American girl going to Russian culture summer camp and having some wonderful times and some awful times. It’s hard being a kid.

Read: Alcyon vol 1 (Richard Marazano, Christophe Ferreira): Two teenagers in ancient Greece set out looking for a divine artifact to save their city-state. Named for the boy, who presumably is supposed to be the mainest character, but he’s a dumbass and the girl is much braver and more competent. Bah.

Read: “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Reporter” (Daniela Tomova): Zombie sled racing, and then it gets weird.

Read: Aposimz vol 1 (Tsutomu Nihei): A tale of survival, revenge, and advanced murder technology on an artificial planet. So far we’ve only seen the ruined and barely habitable outer layers, but the mysteries of the core have been hinted at.

Words: 687 kitten words. No revising.

I got up two hours early (which is actually three hours early because it’s still Spring Forward Week) to go to the office, and it was worse in every way than working from home. I’m sure there are some jobs where being together in one place isn’t worse, but mine is not one of them. Home is more comfortable, has better food, has fewer interruptions, and doesn’t pointlessly waste four hours of my day on commuting. If I want to communicate with my coworkers, I will ping them on Slack like someone who lives in the 21st century.

My boss, who is from India, asked what St Patrick’s is about. I told her it was just white people nonsense, which is not an answer I’m sure she was happy enough, but “beer” was enough of an explanation.

Played: Eclipse Phase 2. More of Nom’s ghosts (she will never live that down, ever), more shooting of zombies, and now the people we left safe at the base camp are freaking out. Yet, somehow, all the Marines are still alive and nominally sane.

Read: “The Backbone of the World” (Stephen Graham Jones): Mysterious prairie dog issues, uncanny strangers, impending doom on various levels, a clever plan.

Read: The Kaiju Preservation Society (John Scalzi): Just what it says on the tin. There are kaiju, somewhere, and they need preserving. It’s a little implausible that the secret is kept so well, but that’s fine. It’s a good romp and terrible people get their comeuppance.

Read: Ogres (Adrian Tchaikovsky): Sadly, the setting twist was obvious from the very beginning, although there is also a plot twist that I did not see coming.

Read: I Can’t Belive I Slept With You vol 1 (Miyako Miahara): A (hot, young) out-of-work game developer gets offered forgiveness of her back rent if she’ll sleep with her (pretty, even younger) landlady, and free rent if she lets her move in and rent out her old apartment. Super-problematic, obviously, but the leads get along and honestly seem to like each other. The twist I thought was going to be there seems to not be, but maybe it’s just unreliable narrator?

Words: FAIL.

Three meetings before 10:00, but at least the work I did yesterday contributed fungibly to a graph in one of them. That’s like success in our capitalist dystopia, right?

Tomorrow I have to get up even earlier so I can have meetings in person, because management doesn’t like it when they can’t see labor laboring.

Watched: Turning Red: When you’re 13, everything is the most important thing. Especially giant red panda.

Words: FAIL. I watched Turning Red to inspire me to delete the project I wrote about a 13-year-old instead of revising it more, but I don’t think it worked. I do need to revise some more, though.

There are definitely some people in the Senate who could use a good stabbing.

Somehow I did some work today. What’s up with that?

Read: “The Latch Key” (Olivia Atwater): Backstory of the Lord Sorcier and why he’s like that.

Read: “Baby Teeth” (Daniel Polansky): Vampire hunters: not necessarily nicer than vampires.

Read: Vampire Blood Drive collection (Mira Ong Chua): Complete collection of all the VBD stories, including some I had not read before. All cute and sexy and somewhat ridiculous.

Words: 495 kitten words and a tiny bit of revision.

Daylight Monday, the worst day of the year! Although, perhaps as a result of sleeping a million hours night before last, it was not unspeakably horrible this time. Just fairly horrible.

Read: The Misfit Soldier (Michael Mammay): A soldier, or maybe we should say, an extremely sketchy guy who happens to be in the military, has a plan to do well by doing good. A caper combined with military action ensues.

Read: “Sleepover” (Alastair Reynolds): Surprisingly similar setup to the “Laundry” novels by Stross.

Words: 604 kitten words, although I’m not entirely happy with them. Maybe DST has made me too stupid to write. Also did some revising, and am happier with that, although I probably need to go over it about a million more times before showing it to anybody.

An hour was lost to the maw of Daylight Savings Time, so despite what the clock said, I was only in bed for like eleven hours! I did eventually get my act together and go grocery shopping, which was like taking my stupid mental and physical health for a stupid walk, but otherwise, nothin’. I thought walking was supposed to make my brain work better.

Read: Yotsuba&! vol 15 (Kiyohiko Azuma): Rocks and books and friends and Yanda and banana smoothies, but also Yotsuba is almost ready for first grade!

Words: 465 kitten words and a tiny bit of revision.

I didn’t really get up earlier than usual for grocery shopping, but I did it with less whining, so that’s good, right?

On-call in the afternoon, but the customers were blessedly quiet.

Read: Rackham Vale (Brian Saliba, Craig Schaffer): An OSR sandbox based on (and including many examples of) the art of Arthur Rackham, featuring many faeries of various scales, mutant alligators, curses, ambitious witches, and party trees, among other fey goings-on.

Played: Zoomwarts. Surprisingly, trying the same plan again worked better. Everybody got killed, but some of them got over it, so that’s good, right? Possibly we’re going to start alternating Zoomwarts with D&D run by Ken, so that Nonny can fight monsters.

Watched: Love, Chunibyo & Other Delusions 1.7-8: Beach episode! But more importantly, we find out what Rikka’s deal is. Also, both positive and negative examples of romantic behavior which may be of use to Jus now that she is a middle-schooler and practically a teenager.

Eaten: Ribs! (Also brisket, burnt ends, collard greens, etc.) Apparently Jus took a break from wanting sushi 24/7 to demand ribs, and nobody was going to object.

Played: Laser tag.

Watched: RWBY 1.1 for Jus. She liked it, and we aren’t even to the trauma part yet!

Words: FAIL. I did a little revising because I figured out what one of the slang terms should be, but not very much.

Made it through another week of capitalism, yay. I need to find some round tuits to get more of these document conversions done, though.

Read: “The Visit” (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie): An alternate timeline in which women are in charge, but act like men do here, so everything is still terrible.

Read: Colostle (Nich Angell): A solo journaling RPG using cards as randomizers, set in a castle so large entire landscapes fit in its rooms, with castle-themed robot monsters that can be dismantled for bonus limbs or pets or what-have-you. I am unlikely to play it, since I already have more things to write than I have brains to write them with, but it’s charming.

Words: 344 kitten words.

Another meeting cancelled today. I’d be happier if it wasn’t because the bosses were off somewhere consuming conspicuously and plotting against labor.

Played: Nothing. Ken is dead of capitalism or something. We tried to come up with something for the rest of us to do, but nah.

Read: ZomCom archives (Emi MG): Zombie humor. May feature too much dismemberment for some, but is bizarrely heartwarming anyway. Also features a vampire and a werewolf, and a background cast of monsters.

Read: The Little Trashmaid archives (s0s2): A comic about a mermaid who lives in what we’ve made of the oceans. Somehow it manages to actually be funny, if you can avoid dying of despair. Much of the proceeds from merch goes to ocean cleanup orgs, so that’s something.

Read: Call of the Night vol 5-6 (Kotoyama): MC has a fellow vampire-wannabe now, although the vampire coven is so ridiculous maybe one or both of them will change their minds. Vampire Lead is also ridiculous, but is not being terrible.

Words: 874 kitten words.

Early morning meeting was cancelled, yay?

Read: “The Black Pages” (Nnedi Okorafor): Modernish Timbouctou, a local boy returns from abroad and gets mixed up with a djinni while the Taliban are burning libraries and shooting people. Not a lot of plot, but lots of doom.

Read: Dark Matter (Mage Hand Press): I am conflicted about this game. It’s fun to read, with laser swords, giant space amoebas, screwdrivers that make noise, saucer-flying cattle mutilators, jumpgates with mysterious maintenance crew, etc, etc, plus D&D in space, but it explicitly includes everything ever published for 5e, which is some TFOS-level nonsense, and it’s all spindled, folded, and mutilated to balance with people waving sharp sticks in caves, which makes the character options that have appealing flavor text a lot blander in practice. Plus it’s D&D, so roll a d20 every five minutes and maybe if you do it long enough, you’ll get to do something meaningful. Maybe.

Watched: Encanto. It was very sweet, and 0% romance! Could have used more capybara, though.

Words: FAIL. I’m not doing a good job of protecting my writing time.

Watched: Cowboy Bebop 8-10: If there had been a second season, that would have been a good low point, but as an ending it’s pretty dark.

Read: Spelunking Through Hell (Seanan McGuire): After seeing the person who has spent fifty years searching the multiverse for her lost husband make cameos in all the other Incryptid books, we finally get her story. It’s pretty grim!

Words: FAIL.

I did work, but is that really accomplishing anything, in the cosmic scheme of things?

Read: Hell Hounds Don’t Heel (Kim McDougall): After three books, the main character finally got her guy, and also saved future Montreal from the magical conspiracy, although it could have gone better. There is at least one more book in the series, but once I return the omnibus to Kindle Unlimited, I don’t know that I’ll get around to reading it.

Words: Did a little revision. Need more slang. Probably counts as FAIL.

Double gaming weekend! There was some doubt, but Jeremy’s dad seems to be doing well so the Gollubs and their unending gaming food were available.

Played: Lancer. No combat this session, but we saved the world anyway. I think Kappa has to buy up her Charm trigger next level, since she did so much diplomacy this mission. Not that the mission is over yet, since Dave accepted our suggestion of mutants inhabiting the engineering spaces of the blink gate we need to repair. It was a pretty satisfying session.

Words: Only 294 words, but I finally implemented the fancier (kinda) calendar for kitten words, and made a link in Writing. Then I thought about revising and didn’t.

I should have gotten up much earlier, but was too useless. I guess it worked out in the end, though.

Sought: The lost art of conversation.

Eaten: Fried chicken, shaved fennel, salad with home-made ranch.

Played: Underhand dodgeball and sneaky statues.

Played: Zoomwarts, at long last! We played late into the night because Marith doesn’t have to work tomorrow. In fact, she is on vacation! But that did not help Rosamund, Bella, or the lizards, because their plan to destroy the magic circle was foiled by a simple forgetfulness potion! Muahahahaha!

Words: 406 kitten words.