Author: Trip the Space Parasite

Plenty of work, especially in the morning. Blugh.

Watched: Cowboy Bebop 7: Faye’s con mom!

Read: Escape From Yokai Land (Charles Stross): Novella about “Bob Howard”‘s visit to Japan briefly mentioned in the beginning of The Delirium Brief. A mere brain-eating demon seems quaint compared to everything that happens after it in the series.

Read: The Delirium Brief (Charles Stross): The one where the UK gets completely boned. No, not the interdimensional invasion, that was nothing compared to this.

Words: FAIL, but I gave out the URL for the kitten words to the writing channel on the slack. Also an actual book published by a slack frond came out today!

I slept way in, but then actually did some errands, so I guess it was okay.

Eaten: Gyoza and tempura and sushi. I made it through eating in a restaurant, but I’m not sure it was a good idea. I really wanted gyoza and tempura, though, and now I am sated.

Read: Dragons Don’t Eat Meat (Kim McDougall): It’s the future, magic has returned and messed up everything, our half-valkyrie heroine makes a living as freelance animal control, which inevitably leads to an apartment full of weird supernatural critters, and then there’s a horrible conspiracy and a hot gargoyle.

Words: 730 kitten words. Still haven’t managed to make a system for publishing them, or work on anything else, or have even two brain cells to rub together.

Although I was on call today, I managed to have a fun day anyway by staying within 15min of my computer and only getting texted once. Whee!

Played: Minigolf and air hockey. I am terrible at minigolf, but we weren’t keeping score, so nobody knows exactly how terrible, and that’s like winning, right? Also I got to display my maturity by not asking if it was my turn to putt every time someone else went.

Played: Catch. It’s a classic for a reason!

Eaten: Muslim Chinese food. It was really good

Watched: Love, Chunibyo & Other Delusions 1.6:

Played: Super Smash Bros. I am also terrible at this game. I just try to face somebody who’s not on my team and mash the basic attack button until I get kicked off the edge three times. But I’m willing to be useless if it makes Nonny happy.

Read: FAIL

Words: FAIL

Today I took time off work to eat buffet and see KITTENS with Ayse and Jus and Nonny. We ended up having to wait an hour for the kittens, because pandemic, but after a lot of escalators I got to pet a grey tuxedo kitten named Vixen, and had my fingers almost chewed off by a a kitten named Madden, and also petted a sleepy void kitten who never came out of their cave to let me read their collar. There were many fewer kittens this time than over the holidays, which made the visit less exciting, but it’s good to know so many kittens got homes.

Read: The Promised Neverland vol 20 (Kaiu Shirai, Posuka Demizu): The end! Also substantial denouement. Sometimes a redemption arc only takes a few pages.

Words: 875 kitten words. Also more scripting.

Work, bah. I would rather sleep.

Read: Serious Trans Vibes archive (Sophie Labelle): Very trans and generally queer slice-of-life in Canada from 5th grade to high school, plus lots of side material about trans rights (posters and such). Some autobiographical, some only inspired-by.

Read: No Matter What You Say, Furi-San Is Scary! vol 2 (Seiichi Kinoue): I don’t see how Male Lead can still think Furi-san is scary, she’s such a cinnamon roll.

Read: Pink One (Daniel Rose): Starts off with “What if humans were small and fragile-looking compared to all aliens?” but then ruins it with “…and also superior in every possible way, both mental and physical?” as well as bad writing. Serves me right for reading self-published Kindle Unlimited books.

Words: A little more scripting, although really I should be done by now.

No work, but I did manage to do a couple of chores today, including figuring out how to run CGI scripts on the new site.

Read: The Sheep Dragon (LG Estrella): Another volume of side stories and backstory. The title story is about a baby dragon making friends with magic sheep, so I approve.

Listened: Ludonarrative Dissidents 9: 13th Age: They agreed (or at least didn’t disagree) that if you must play a D&D, 13th Age is the one to play, which is pretty much how I feel about it.

Words: Not words as such, but I did work on publishing stuff (to the web, not real publishing) so it’s not actually a failure.

Marith is still too sick to do things, so I made my way over to Monkeycat Towers all by myself. I mostly remembered how it works!

Eaten: Pozole! Ken used a new recipe! It was super-tasty! Possibly I should not have eaten a second bowl of it right before playing time, but how could I not?

Played: Ball tag, noodle hockey, volley-soccer, shrieking, doll fashion design. No Zoomwarts, because Marith has the Illness. (No, not that illness.)

Watched: Love, Chunibyo & Other Delusions 1.4-5: Dekomori vs Morisummer!

Read (to Nonny): Meet The House Kittens and A Bridge Too Fur (John Patrick Green): Adorable kittens try to get into the construction business, but no one takes them seriously because they are too adorable. Then they need the help of some dogs, because water, but cannot take the dogs seriously, because dogs. In the end, many people learn better!

Words: 422 kitten words.

I need to find some more biology facts for these meetings. The new support website looks pretty good, though.

Read: Two Necromancers, A Dwarf Kingdom, And A Sky City (LG Estrella): Like all books in this series, has what it says on the tin (plus all the OP weirdos the two necromancers collected in previous books), plus the impending war against the country that never got over their country breaking away centuries ago, and extradimensional horrors. Although there’s plenty of setup for another book, there doesn’t seem to be one.

Read: Dungeon Bitches (Emily F Allen, Sarah Carapace, Mxtress Khan): Another game I am not qualified to play, never mind run, but I wanted to see what they did with it. PbtA, queer women and their trauma explore dungeons because it’s better than trying to live in heterocentric patriarchy. The playbooks (called Deals, as in “so what’s your deal?”) include runaway nuns, renegade princesses, witches, Frankensteinian undead, virgin huntresses, shapeshifting monsters, and revolutionary firebrands. Despite being fairly recent, it still has AW-style sex moves, although there’s always an option to switch out for the intimacy moves favored by later PbtA games to support ace characters (or vice versa in the case of the Virgin Huntress). Emotional and physical trauma are use the same hitpoints and get healed the same way, frequently through sex moves. The text has lots of cussing, and the art and layout reinforce that this is a hardcore game.

Words: FAIL.

Surprise, we were the studio audience for a training video. No one told us to laugh, though.

Played: Eclipse Phase 2. Oh no, is this the part where we have to be clever? We’re not clever, we’re meatheads by design! How about we give Nom more shit about ghosts instead of being clever?

Read: FAIL. (Hey, if not writing is a failure, how can not reading be better?)

Words: FAIL.

Another early-morning meeting, although at least this one was somewhat regularly scheduled.

I tried doing some email wrangling during the slow parts of work, and feel better this evening. Not necessarily a lot smarter, but like I maybe could have done something if I had tried.

Read: Two Necromancers, A Dragon, And A Vampire (LG Estrella): Book 3/4, in which the exploding elf gets a baby dragon who helps the group break a vampire out of jail and completely obliterate an enemy research complex. Includes every necromancer’s favorite: zombie pirates.

Words: 495.

Surprise all-hands meeting! But it was just for the old and new CEOs to speechify, the company’s not going out of business or anything.

It’s not like I was doing great at my work desk, but moving to my own computer definitely made me feel less useful. Maybe I need to turn the desk around so it’s not so enclosed? Or get better light somehow? More windows? Maybe it’s just that I backed so many kickstarters that my email takes forever to deal with. Or that after spending all day doing computer stuff for capitalism, additional computer stuff is Too Much. Whatever it is, not being able to get any of my own stuff done in the evening is annoying.

Read: The Hungry Dragon Cookie Company (LG Estrella): Short stories around and between the series about a bunch of completely OP weirdos having adventures at the behest of the government they want pardons from. Maybe I should go back and read the rest of that series, I remember it being about what my pandemic-addled brain could handle.

Words: FAIL.

Complete uselessness.

Read: “The Chronologist” (Ian R MacLeod): A village with an uncertain relationship to time, a restless young lad, and a predictable outcome.

Read: “The Tale of Ak and Humanity” (Yefim Zozulya): Early Soviet story, very Russian, much purge, excess government, cynicism. Pretty much all atmosphere.

Read: Summer Frost (Blake Crouch): It’s tempting to blame the viewpoint character, but it’s not like she ever had a chance. She was only human.

Words: FAIL

On call, but nothing happened, so that’s good.

Played: Zoomwarts. Bella is probably not a vampire yet! Less clear about Baby Lizard.

Eaten: Assorted tacos from the taqueria that the burger place turned into for lunch, and then carne asada burritos for dinner.

Played: About 5000 steps of assorted roughhousing.

Read: The OP Lich Is A Returnee vol 2-4 (Stuart Grosse): Mostly infodumps about the magic system, interrupted by the OP Lich steamrollering anyone who puts themselves in her way.

Words: FAIL. I’d say I used up all my creativity on Zoomwarts, but that’s making an assumption that’s probably not borne out by evidence.

Metaboss B is back from feeling poorly with Covid, hurray! Also got reminded to submit expense reports for phone/internet

Read: Sisters (Raina Telgemeier): Autobiographical graphic novel about sisterly strife and a road trip.

Read: Ghosts (Raina Telgemeier): Not autobiographical, but about two sisters. These ones move to a town on the North California coast which is supposed to be good for the younger one’s cystic fibrosis, but the people talk about ghosts a lot…

Read: Three Immortals (Bert-Oliver Boehmer): Space opera about mistakes, betrayals, immortality, mistaken wars, megalomaniacs, people trying to do the right thing, people trying to take over the galaxy, mysterious technology from before the collapse of civilization, etc. I’m pretty sure it’s slaughtering QM, but whomst among us, etc.

Read: The Maid I Hired Recently is Mysterious vol 2 (Wakame Konbu): The Beautiful Maid with Purple Eyes and her Young Master are still mostly thinking only of each other, but now there are other characters, and also dress-up sequences. Still not much in the way of socially-redeeming value.

Words: 731 kitten words. Which I still haven’t figured out how to publish.

More customer calling, but we got The Expert (former boss M) to explain things to the customer. Now they have action items, instead of just waiting for us to come down from the mountain with stone tablets.

I went on another walk to get gaming food, but when I got home with my satay and eggplant (and finally, brown rice), I wasn’t hungry. I don’t think that’s how that is supposed to work!

Played: Eclipse Phase 2. Release the duckling-bot! Also, what is with Nom and all these ghosts? Maybe ghosts like cigars too.

Read: Bad Moon On The Rise (Annie Bellet): A weretiger hitwoman kills a bunch of people, most of whom probably deserve it, rescues the girl, somehow keeps her not-very-elite team alive, etc. I think this is a spinoff of another series, or maybe the furniture of urban fantasy is considered sufficiently well-understood at this point that settings don’t need to be explained.

Words: FAIL.

Got up early to learn the thing, then there was an unending customer call that didn’t end up going much of anywhere. Did not manage to leave the apartment.

Read: The OP Lich Is A Returnee vol 1 (Stuart Grosse): Forty years after twenty students are abducted summoned as heroes to another world, the lone “survivor” returns to find that the summoning spell made her homeworld magical, but the practice of magic is somewhat different than she’s used to.

Read: The Children of Old Leech (ed Ross E Lockhart, Justin Steele): Tribute anthology to Laird Barron, cosmic horror in modern prose. Few of the stories were striking, but none of them were bad. All of them were full of doom for puny humans.

Words: 344 kitten words. I should at least read one of my other projects, although perhaps I would rather die.

This day would have been better if I had slept more competently. I did take a stupid walk for my stupid mental and physical health, though.

Read: Best Laid Plans (Cameron Lund): High school romance, including angst about not having sex, hot older guys, friends with questionable taste, guys who are terrible, etc. Sadly het.

Read: Sunny Side Up (Jennifer L Holm, Matthew Holm): Graphic novel about a 5th-grader who gets packed off to Florida in the 1970s, which is full of old people, comic books, and alligators, yet not actually an escape from family problems.

Read: Call Me… Dee (Ralts Bloodthorne): Expansion of the horror segment of one of the main books of the series. Meh. Characters too powerful when released from their genre.

Words: 437 kitten words. My attempt to suck less in February is really not going anywhere.

Played: Lancer. We got bonus licenses so we could put up an overwhelming show of force against some scrubs that thought they could mess with Unity, and it went really well for about three rounds (yay gravity cannon!) until we found that the enemy was also bait, and we all got sucked through blinkspace to an unknown planet that is having some kind of military conflict. Apparently we’re going to have to pick whichever side is most aligned with fully automated luxury queer space communism, or failing that, whichever side is most likely to be able to produce exotic matter, and use our mechs to assure their victory. Also, at the gaming table, I was thoroughly encroached upon by a dog.

Words: 432 kitten words. Does anyone care? Probably not.

Surprisingly, I’m not on call for any part of today! Not that it had any impact on my complete uselessness.

Played: Zoomwarts. Bella, Rosamund (now conscious), and the lizards are making progress, but nothing is ever easy. Now they’re all in the vampire room (aka morning solarium), although only Baby Lizard and Bella are actually chained to the wall.

Eaten: Instant coq au vin, romanesco (not tesco fresco), goat brie, etc.

Watched: Love, Chunibyo & Other Delusions 1.3: Rikka has a minion!

Played: Murder Mystery until Nonny got frustrated, then Sneaky Statues.

Words: FAIL.

Once again, it is simultaneously both “whew, made it to Friday somehow” and “how is it already Friday I’m not prepped for the weekend”. Thank you, Pandemic Time.

Words: 756 words about kittens. Everybody loves kittens, but this is not the right trend in writing. On the other hand, I am not writing an actual book that is available from real websites, so what does it even matter?

HAPPY HAPPY VIVIAN-DAY!!

I, sadly, had dental cleaning, but it was pretty quick, which I think is a good sign. Still don’t like the fluoride gunk all over my teeth for the rest of the day, though.

Played: Eclipse Phase 2. We finally got a PC fatality, mangled internally by a strong magnetic field(TM) yanking around and heating up his highly sus cyberware. Also an intimate view of Nom’s surgically-installed cigar-smuggling organ, replicated dead commanding officers, and late-night ghosts hallucinations. So far my character is mostly fine (thanks to drugs) but I should probably have a replacement character ready.

Words: FAIL.

If you don’t believe in either zeroes or centuries, it’s 2222!

Early-morning company all-hands meeting was kind of fuzzy, but once again it failed to be an announcement that databases are impossible and we’re all fired, so I’m not complaining.

Read: We Were The Lanaktallan Of The Atomic Hooves – A Memoir (Ralts Bloodthorne): Heroic tanker on one side of the three-sided conflict does his best to protect

Words: 995. I think that’s actually a good stopping place for the project I’ve been revising, so I just need to revise the new stuff I wrote, and then maybe I can show it to people. Then I’ll have to leave the writing channel on the slack forever.

Morning knowledge transfer canceled again, because too many customers. Sheesh.

Read: Fizzybrew and Fear (Ralts Bloodthorne): An alien teenager has to survive the sudden attack of brain-sucking alien robots. Sadly, the aliens are almost indistinguishable from C20 American humans: patriarchy, sex-negativity, individual automobiles, convenience stores, etc. I think they’re only alien so that the humans can heroically save the day.

Words: 1024. Only kitten words, and I didn’t manage to do a Pomodoro, but it’s better than January, right?

The customers lost their chill again.

Read: Girls Weekend (CM Nascosta): Three elf ladies go to an orcish nudist colony in hopes of being in the shameless smut genre for a weekend, but oh no! Feelings!

Read: P’Thok Chronicles (Ralts Bloodthorne): Stories of the hero of the giant, homicidal, mantis-doofuses who wrested from humanity the secrets of ice cream, vaping, and birth control, returning with great boons for his species.

Read: Komi Can’t Communicate vol 17 (Tomohito Oda): But in this volume, Komi does communicate! In complete (whispered) sentences! About strong emotions, even! Go Komi!

Words: 478 kitten words.