Author: Trip the Space Parasite

So apparently this is supposed to be called “Patriot Day”, because DHS and TSA and Gauntanamo Bay Torture Facility are all things to celebrate. Do Not Want. Republicans Fuck Right Off.

Despite a general hatred for Americans, I managed to go grocery shopping and stuff, so it’s like a successful Saturday. Still no visiting at Ayse & Ken’s because Nonny didn’t sleep and so everyone is frazzled.

Played: Zoomwarts. I tried to implement some of the doom I made notes on from the movies, but I think people were too unfocused to do anything with it. Maybe next time. Also Bella has apparently dumped her new love interest already.

Words: I found a continuity error dating from a year ago in the kitten words, which destroyed my motivation. I later found out that it didn’t come up until just a couple of months ago, but by then it was too late.

Apparently I forgot how to sleep again, but fortunately there was not a lot that needed to happen at work today.

Eaten: Creamy lemon dill chicken, zucchini, and snap peas.

Watched: My Hero Academia 87-89: Last two of S4 and then the first one of S5, a lot of which was recap anyway. Can Endeavor really be redeemed, though?

Read: Pahua and the Soul Stealer (Lori M Lee): Another from the “Rick Riordan Presents” line of middle-grade fantasy in non-white-people mythoi. This one is Hmong, about which I knew nothing going in, but was not surprised to find it similar to other E/SE Asian cultures.

Read: Amelia O’Donohue is So Not a Virgin (Helen Fitzgerald): Scottish all-girls boarding school drama. I saw the big plot twist ahead of time, although perhaps not at the very first clue.

Read: Lycanthropy and Other Chronic Diseases (Kristen O’Neal): It is in fact about both those things, and also Internet support groups and friendship and love and family and life goals.

Words: FAIL. I am not smart enough to write.

I did not want a three-hour customer meeting on top of the regular Thursday meetings.

Played: Eclipse Phase 2. After a lot of looking up images for Meathab, we actually played the PCs going to the Titanian outback in search of a fleeting network connection and now they are taking to the sea Kraken Mare in a rental boat piloted by someone named Wriggly Sven in search of someone who may be harboring a dangerous memetic virus.

Words: FAIL.

I guess I did a work. Wheee.

Watched: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban: Manne, I completely forgot to put any of this stuff in Zoomwarts even though it’s supposed to be happening at the same time. I think Bella and Rosamund need a werewolf attack, and also Harry needs to get sucked into a temporal vortex.

Read: Fleet of Knives and Light of Impossible Stars (Gareth L Powell): Rest of the trilogy that started with Embers of War. The solution to everyone’s problems of course turned out to be more of the same problems only bigger, with additional problems. Then in the middle of the third book, a completely new character appears to fix everything. Also the author does not understand basic physics. So overall, a weak ending to an okay beginning.

Words: Check, kinda.

Monday, observed, but not too bad for all that. Customers attacked, but we fended them off, and I cleaned up after some previous attacks.

Watched: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets: This movie is too long (2:40, an entire evening!) but I took many notes about horrible things to do to Bella and Rosamund.

Read: Asylum (Lindsay Buroker): A new “Star Kingdom” novel, following new protagonists, which is still charming, but I am annoyed that Buroker seems to only write straight people. [character] wants to have sex at least once in her life, [other character] wants to have sex basically all the time, and yet! I sulk.

Words: Check.

It’s Labor Day, so I should be helping build guillotines for Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, or something, but instead I’m being a useless lump. I managed to do a grocery shop, but that’s about it.

Read: The Ruin of Angels (Max Gladstone): Sixth novel in the Craft Sequence, about colonialism and hubristic tech startups and surveillance and brain squids and criminal gods and broken reality. Gladstone apparently understands that there’s just no point to male characters.

Watched: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone: Not very good as a movie, but I was just watching it for inspiration for Zoomwarts. The movie had a lot more random magical nonsense (like the flying keys and chessboard), more monsters (troll in the castle!), magic without specific incantations or even wand use, and a distressing lack of suits of armor to hide behind. It didn’t even have much in the way of secret passages, just the one area the Golden Trio found “accidentally”. Also a distinct lack of romantic drama, of course, but not all 11-year-olds can be as boy-crazy as Bella.

Words: Check.

Played: Lancer. This time we had two combats, one against opponents with special powers that went about how it did in Dave’s simulation runs, and then one against a bunch of mooks that went really quickly because a) we all used our daily power, b) they couldn’t roll for beans, and c) we almost never missed. It was still pretty rough, I think the PCs took an average of at least 1 structure damage each, but now they are in control of the printer and can get a full repair. Apparently we are having enough fun that we will force Dave to come up with a second adventure.

Read: Devil’s Candy archives (Rem, Bikkuri): Up through the beginning of chapter 14. I really like this comic, it has a very TFOS vibe.

Words: Check, I guess, kinda.

Read: The Night Raven (Sarah Painter): Outlying daughter of one of the four magical crime families of London comes back to wait out fallout from her non-magic-crime job in Scotland and gets sucked right back in with missing cousins and horrible uncles and ghosts and hit men and hot detectives.

Read: Days of Love at Seagull Villa vol 3 (Kodama Naoko): Sorry, [character], you had literally years to ask [other character] out, but all you did was neg her and pretend to be straight, so now you’re stuck with a dumb boy while [other character] gets all the girlsmooches. The end!

Watched: The Case Study of Vanitas 7-10: Lots of backstory, more eccentric characters, and a final, season-ending, terrible reveal. Also vampire bites, which seem to count somewhere between kissing and sex.

Words: FAIL.

Played: Eclipse Phase 2. Ken was not ready to run Meathab, so instead the PCs investigated more on Titan even though Kelsey wasn’t around to play Svafa. Then they egocast to Mars (Chi got a swarmanoid morph for Gimel, because no one that cool should have to be humanoid if they don’t want to) and sent Njal poking around the hab next to the hab that went dark, which has apparently become a military problem for the Planetary Consortium. Surely this will all be fine.

Read: You Have Been Judged (Craig Martelle, Michael Anderle): A young prosecutor, having snapped and murdered a scumbag who got acquitted even though she knew through inadmissable telepathic means that he was guilty, is sentenced to get cybered up and fly around the galaxy being judge, jury, and executioner, and otherwise enforce Imperial law without oversight. Neither the empire nor its laws are particularly just, so the whole thing is quite unsympathetic.

Words: FAIL, but at least I made some notes about what to write later.

Wait, September!? What?!

Also, what’s going on with the weather in NY/NJ? That’s ridiculous!

Marith said, “Space pirate school? Isn’t that just Moretsu Pirates?” But I don’t think so, because that was at most Secret Space Pirate After-School Club. I think Space Pirate School would be the less-prestigious rival to the school where scions of Well-Connected Galactic Families go. Also, aliens would be mandatory. So maybe it’s just TFOS? No, Hogwarts in space is different, boarding school instead of suburban American school.

Read: Between Family (WR Gingell): Nine books in, we finally find out some of Pet’s name, a bit about her family, more of her powers (to the brief regret of the boss villain), and then everything goes straight to hell, again. (It looks like Gingell only writes het romance, which is too bad, I was hoping for Morgana x Pet.)

Words: Check.

I was somewhat productive at work, and then I went to the dentist and returned with almost 4% more teeth. It’s weird having a tooth instead of a hole there, and it feels too much like when I had a tooth that was a hole and filled it with wax, so I keep flinching away from chewing on that side, but I will persevere!

So, I was thinking: Hogwarts is universally beloved and all, but what about… SPACE PIRATE SCHOOL?

That’s it, that’s the whole thought. What were you expecting?

Read: Simone Breaks All The Rules (Debbie Rigaud): High school senior in New Jersey who wants to have a life vs her extremely strict Haitian immigrant mother who wants to keep her wrapped in cotton wool forever.

Read: The Lord Sorcier (Olivia Atwater): Prequel to Half a Soul, how England’s Lord Sorcier came out of the Napoleonic wars.

Read: The Slither Sisters, Teacher’s Pest, and Substitute Creature (Charles Gilman): Books 2-4 in the “Lovecraft Middle School” series, 7th graders vs Mythos-inspired, or at least Mythos-named, monsters trying to eat the student body and eventually… the WORLD!

Words: Check.

Stayed up way too late reading, slept incompetently again, but at least it’s only 2000000 degrees out today and the air seems a little better. I tried to grocery shop, but Safeway’s apparently doesn’t carry diet Snapple any more.

Read: Every Sky A Grave (Jay Posey): Similar genre to Ninefox Gambit or Blackwing War, SF future with additional magic, but language-based instead of math-based. When the inhabitants of a planet misuse the language that holds the empire together, the planet might get contaminated, and then the protagonist is sent by her mystic order to euthanize it. Or maybe they’ve been lying to everyone the whole time; what are the odds, based on the genre? The author starts his acknowledgements with Jesus, so I can’t help view the whole thing in a Catholic-vs-Protestant light, but I haven’t actually checked.

Read: School Zone Girls vol 2 (Ningiyau): I lost track of the characters a short ways in, so I think that’s it for this series.

Words: Check.

I slept very incompetently, and then by the time I got up it was about 4000000 degrees out and not even really sunny, hazy and humid and terrible air. I guess I did the two things I really had to get done today (grocery shopping and Zoomwarts), but the day feels like it was completely wasted. I didn’t even manage to create a test user in WordPress, since it wants a unique email address for every user.

Played: Zoomwarts. Finally Bella and Baby Lizard paid off their debt to the mermaid by rescuing her from pirates and possibly murdering the pirates. Also Rosamund’s plan to get a national treasure to push back against the Ministry’s reframing of history went off swimmingly. Umbrellas for all!

Read (browsed?): Barbarous up to the beginning of chapter 6 (Ananth Hirsh, Yuko Ota): A surly magic school dropout gets a job offer she can’t refuse from a very mysterious landlady and ends up cleaning out haunted apartments, exterminating infestations of ghostly mushrooms, and bonding with her troubled coworker. Then things get weird.

Words: Check, although it seems like so little for an otherwise entirely wasted day.

Eaten: Balsamic salmon and broccoli, balsamic tomatoes and mozzarella.

Watched: The Case Study of Vanitas 4-6: Who this Domi person is, Noé’s tragic past, and the curse-bringers step up their offensive.

Read: Embers of War (Gareth L Powell): In the aftermath of an interstellar war, veterans (human, AI, and alien) in basically the French Foreign Search & Rescue have to deal with their pasts, the fallout of the past conflict, and the assholes who are happy to start new wars. The ending looks pretty good for all except the last category, but this is apparently the first of a trilogy, so I’m guessing it’s not as great as it looks.

Read: Darling (K Ancrum): A reimagining of Peter Pan, in the modern day and a completely different genre. I think it’s well done, but like all reimaginings, how you like it depends on how attached you are to the original, and I’m not very.

Words: FAIL, but I am getting a lot closer to being able to publish past words!

Played: Eclipse Phase 2. The PCs made it to Titan (not that far) and went drinking with grad students and postdocs, thus learning about the public parts of the project that went bad. Conlangs for the… weirdness.

Read: Fire in the Blood and The First Chill of Autumn (WR Gingell): Dragon x princess vs annoying prince, and then finally the shards of the sword promised in the subtitles are gathered, lives are forged into magic, tragedy ensues but more for the annoying faeries, and even after tragedy, there can be love. Even if it’s all het (I don’t think Gingell writes anything else?)

Words: FAIL.

Did anything happen to me today? Not really.

Read: Haunted Magic (JC Daniels): A side mission, or at least one that doesn’t involve an existential threat to all supernatural-kind. And I think that’s all there is so far.

Read: Call of the Night vol 3 (Kotoyama): Ko meets more vampire babes, who are not significantly more sensible than Nazuna, and also talk trash about things they’ve never done. Plus, the rare(?) male vampire.

Read: Twelve Days of Faery (WR Gingell): Enchantress x king, with no impediments to the romance except the plot, a bunch of really annoying faeries, and a minor misunderstanding. It was cute.

Read: Light Chaser (Peter F Hamilton, Gareth L Powell): STL space opera in which the main character realizes after tens of thousand of years that maybe something isn’t quite right.

Words: Check.

Zoom medicine, which I guess went okay. I might be taking more of one medicine and less of another. I have to go back in October to get my thyroid punctured again.

Read: Bladed Magic, Misery’s Way, and Haunted Blade (JC Daniels): Possibly even bigger problems, still solved with a lot of angst and violence, also spinoffs/expansions of things that happened between books.

Words: check.

Monday. Again.

Read: The Ancient Magus’ Bride: Wizard’s Blue vol 2-3 (Makoto Sanda, Isuo Tsukumo): Reread of vol 2 (the Giselle-in-fancy-Chinese-clothes episode) and now vol 3 is out so the plot has advanced and Ao has made another friend.
Read: Edged Blade and Shadowed Blade (JC Daniels): The main character’s past catches up with her. Violence ensues, because everyone always thinks she isn’t made of 110% pure murder. Also, her boyfriend is an asshole.

Words: check.

Played: Lancer. This time we actually played! Skill rolls were made, dissent among the less-enlightened polity was exploited, and mechs slugged it out in the gravityless, low-pressure tunnels of a military base that should have been abandoned. Interrogating the prisoners from that got us information that fulfills our basic mission goal, but there’s a lot more slugging that needs to be done. Like every version of D&D, Lancer invents new terminology for the same concepts and randomly changes things around, but it’s still turn-based tactical combat on a grid. I didn’t find it as annoying as Gloomhaven, at least?

Words: Check.

The cleaner was efficient this time, so I managed to go grocery shopping and only then implode into a useless lump. There is still plague of all flavors all over everywhere and especially at Ayse and Ken’s, so no visiting. I was on call for the afternoon, but nothing happened.

Played: Zoomwarts. We were not very focused; I blame Jus’s new phone or maybe my old brain. We got some drama, but Dumbledore retconned it. Surely this will not come back to haunt anyone at all.

Watched: Fena, Pirate Princess 1-2: You’d think a show called “Pirate Princess” would be more kid-friendly, but the first episode has a brothel and rape threats and numerous murders. After that, it seems to mellow out.

Read: Broken Blade (JC Daniels): After being kidnapped and tortured in the previous book, the main character puts herself back together, partially with the help of friends but mostly because there’s a really big problem that needs her special murderizing.

Words: Check.

Coworker k is out sick, but fortunately the customers have calmed down after the past couple of day, so nobody died. Much.

Played: Eclipse Phase 2. Wrapup and XP and Sanity Rez and Lucidity, and now a new problem, this one coming from a distant branch of the glorious constellation that is Chi. But how much trouble can the study of philosophy and linguistics cause?

Read: I’ll Be The One (Lyla Lee): A Korean-American teenagers enters a K-pop reality show competition because fatphobes can DIAF. Sadly, this will take a lot of kindling even though she is very good at singing and dancing and has somewhat supportive friends. There is a ridiculously cute boy and delicious tacos, and also a horrible mother.

Words: FAIL.

I was somewhat productive at work despite Monday. Morale was improved by a ruling from above that Support doesn’t need to be in the office, as long as we remain productive. Since no mention was made of the past YEAR AND A HALF when we worked from home every day, I don’t think this is likely to be an issue, although I guess people being out (boss A on maternity leave, boss2 B on vacation for weeks (does he think he lives in a civilized country like (checks notes) the UK or something?!)) could be a problem. I’m sure it will be fine.

Read: Happy Kanako’s Killer Life vol 1 (Toshiya Wakabayashi): An office worker quits her soul-destroying job and ends up hired by a company of hitmen. She turns out to be a natural, possibly because all her targets are people she would have killed for free. No gore, some return of self-esteem, inexplicable lame animal puns. Meh.

Read: Night Blade (JC Daniels): Fairly generic urban fantasy, badass half-human heroine, asshole weres and vampires and cops and such, CW for everything bad happening to the heroine.

Words: Check.

I didn’t have anything to do today except a couple of grocery shopping expeditions, and that’s about all I accomplished. I texted with Marith and Jus about Zoomwarts and my ideas to rein in the characters’ rampant sleep deprivation and homework neglect. I’m not sure I want to subject my players to homebrew rules changes, though. Oh, the other thing I did was look for pictures for a Lancer character, but meh.

Words: check.

On call all day, but the customers did not attack. Since I could not go grocery shopping, I was completely useless all day.

Stayed up too late reading: Shards of Earth (Adrian Tchaikovsky): The elements are not new: immense alien forces that destroy planets, FTL travel that has bad effects on human minds, humans modified to deal with hyperspace, untranslatable aliens, ruins of lost civilizations, etc. But they are well done, and hang together, and the humans are stupid in exactly the ways humans are stupid, and the aliens aren’t random, they obviously have something that works for them, and the various plot elements are connected, and probably will turn out to be even more unified in later books. I stayed up until 3:00 reading it, anyway.

Played: Zoomwarts, still with zoom. Bella and Rosamund both have dates to the holiday party, although Bella might get murdered by Slytherins first.

Words: check.

Friday the 13th? Maybe that’s why my brain is completely nonfunctional today. But Marith came over bearing tomato chicken and broccoli, that’s definitely auspicious.

HR says no change to coming in to the office and putting on a mask three days a week. Fuck the yacht-owning classes.

Watched: Avatar the Last Airbender 3.18-21: The end! Sozin’s Comet, Ozai, Azula, everything! Between Azula and Toph, why hasn’t Jus seen this?

Watched:The Case Study of Vanitas 3: This show is not short of things happening, both murders and smooches, only short of explanations! And apparently next episode is where it starts getting weird.

Read: The Maleficent Seven (Cameron Johnston): Seven extremely high-level fantasy villains (demonologist, necromancer, pirate queen, vampire lord, etc) are drawn back together decades after parting on bad terms to defend a small village against vile monotheists. Plots, plans, schemes, sacrifice, and murder on a massive scale ensue.

Words: FAIL. See above re: brain or lack thereof. But I’m on call all of tomorrow so maybe I’ll sit home and write edit?