Author: Trip the Space Parasite

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

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.