Author: Trip the Space Parasite

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.

The new project at work involves a lot of cutting and pasting, but hopefully the end result will be worth it.

Read: Dervishes Don’t Dance (Kim McDougall): Sequel to Dragons Don’t Eat Meat, further conspiracy and slow-burn romance in a returned-magic Montreal, with many strange magical creatures.

Read: See You, Space Cowboy (Tidal Wave Games): It’s kind of a simplified PBtA, with some Cowboy Bebop frosting. It’s simpler than Scum and Villainy, but not nearly as appealing. I feel bad saying that, since I know it was someone’s labor of love and fandom, but apparently I suck.

Words: 576 kitten words, which are now readable.

I was less useless at work today than yesterday, so that’s something, I guess. Maybe.

Played: Eclipse Phase 2. More wounds, more trauma, but then the marines got to do real marine stuff instead of bored marine screwing around and were triumphant. Not that it really helped anything.

Read: “Bhatia, PI” (Shiv Ramdas): Incompetent wannabe PI with competent sidekick, modern Indian supernatural version, by the author of that hilarious rice guy twitter thread.

Read: I’m A Wolf, But My Boss Is A Sheep vol 1 (Shino Shimizu): Gender roles and unrequited lovein Japanese corporate culture. The carnivore(-descended otherwise perfectly normal human)/herbivore(ditto) divide is not used to particularly illuminating effect, alas.

Words: FAIL.

Another weekly meeting before my usual start time. Maybe I should give up and just always start work at 8:30.

Read: The Labyrinth Index (Charles Stross): The one where Mhari and her crew have to go to the US and it’s horrible. More than usual.

Read: Dead Lies Dreaming (Charles Stross): The one about petty supervillains living under the reign of Nyarlathotep.

Words: FAIL. I tried to do one last revision pass but my brain stopped after just a few paragraphs, because it is dumb.

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