Category: Life of a Space Parasite

Played: Dark Matter. However, after leveling up to level 7, for all the good it did us, we finished the campaign! Space hamsters were saved from the Abyss, the guardians of the threshold were able to retire, etc. Not sure what we’re going to do now, but we have two whole weeks to think about it. Is everything I run terrible? Yes. Am I likely to end up running anyway? Probably.

Read: Karen From HR ch1-8 (Unpretty): Batman fanfic about an employee of WayneCorp, who has a hard and unusual life and then meets Bruce Wayne in person so things go sharply downhill. Kind of harrowing, but also Corinne is great for some extremely dark comedic value of “great”.

Written: 295 today, 1542/1000 for the week, 11089/10000 overall.

American date style is stupid.

Cleaners came early in the morning, so I was up to go grocery shopping before being on call all afternoon. There were some customers, and a lot of uselessness. I tried to take a nap, but didn’t do a very good job.

Read: The Accidental Summoning (Kos Play): Teenage boy discovers the secret LitRPG world somehow hiding behind modern life, tries to summon a magic teacher and ends up with a cute teenaged girl, learns that his magic is the Forbidden Ultimate Power, etc. Except for being set in the US and a book, it would be a cheesy shōnen anime.

Written: 253/1247/10794. Not sure this is going anywhere useful, though.

I have nothing against Australian lemon-choco cakes, but probably wouldn’t have picked this for my header if Coworker T hadn’t used it for his fact in the meeting today. (My fact was about turtle butts.)

Watched: Murder Drones 4-5: Still pretty ???, but then YouTube rolled over to somebody explaining his theory of what happened, and it seemed pretty plausible. No idea whether it’s correct.

Written: 181 today, 994 for the week, 10541 overall.

Finally signed up for BigBadCon and booked a hotel room and put in the vacation request for work and stuff. Now I just have to die in a pit come up with something to run. Or admit that I can’t GM worth beans.

Read: MonsTABOO vol 3 (Yuya Takahashi, TALI): After the tragic events of vol 2, our MC is back not just for revenge but to expose and tear down the whole rotten edifice of monster bloodsport.

Read: The Executioner and Her Way of Life vol 1 (Mato Sato, Ryo Mitsuya, nilitsu): People from other worlds always end up causing catastrophes with their isekai powers, so the church has special assassins to bump them off as soon as they arrive. This new girl is too powerful to just shank, though, so the assassin has to travel back to headquarters with her, which will certainly not awaken any feelings in her cold black heart.

Written: 156/813/10360.

We have no office this week, so I don’t have to commute! Being at home is a lot more comfortable. It’s not even too hot.

Despite the lack of commute, I somehow left the apartment anyway. Not sure I approve of the outside world.

Read: The Detective is Already Dead vol 1-2 (mugiko, nigozyu, Umibouzu): The trouble-magnet teenaged sidekick of a monster-hunting detective thought he could return to a comparatively normal life a year after the detective’s death, but no, there’s another mystery, and another after that.

Written: 261 today, 657 this week, and 10204/10000 overall. Let’s see if I have any motivation for the remaining 3½ weeks.

7:30 meeting, ugh. However, it’s less hot, so that’s something?

Played: Nothing, Ken has too much work and Kelsey has too little stable employment.

Read: There’s No Freaking Way I’ll Be Your Lover! Unless… vol 1 (Musshu, Teren Mikami, Eku Takeshima): She wants to be best friends. She wants to be girlfriends. Whose view of the ideal relationship will prevail? And what about that really cute girl with the soft hands?

Read: The Two of Them Are Pretty Much Like This vol 2 (Takashi Ikeda): More grownup lesbian slice of life. Not a lot happens, but the main characters are good with that.

Read: Daemons of the Shadow Realm vol 1 (Hiromu Arakawa): New series from the creator of FMA. Not sure about it yet, but that’s quite a genre shift in the first volume.

Written: 215/396/9943. I think I recovered from forgetting my MC’s tragic backstory, mostly. Feelings are still the worst, though.

On call in the afternoon, but hardly any customers came to annoy me, so I was able to be very bad at Minecraft. I’m sorry, bees! I didn’t mean to kill you all through my incompetence! But I did eventually succeed in harvesting some honeycomb to make beehives, for when I figure out how to get bees to my farm. (It’s too far to lead them with flowers, so I think I’ll have to enchant a Silk Touch axe to steal the whole nest.) Also I found a hole in the ocean, which is pretty impressive but didn’t have anything special at the bottom.

Read: Nimona (Noelle Stevenson): I still want to throw all my material belongings into the sea, but I haven’t yet which means I was able to dig up my copy of the Nimona GN from like eight years ago. It’s different in many ways from the movie, but still the same story, which is pretty good adaptation. Or maybe Nimona is just that strong of a character.

Watched: Estab Life 5-6. For an episode that was all about underwear, that wasn’t actually that much fanservice. It’s also impressive how four people on a five-person team can all have both Cha and Wis as dump stats.

Written: 209/1377/9386.

Fortunately we did not have beans ‘n’ franks for office lunch. We did have sandwiches, but there wasn’t even cake to celebrate the end of our time in this office. Next week, no office; the week after that, new office. I guess I should figure out what trains to use to get there and back home.

Emptying the sea isn’t rewarding, so I switched to trying to get bees, but managed to mess up both smoking the bees and harvesting honeycomb from the hive.  Bah!

Read: The Mandroid Murders (Robin CM Duncan): It’s the future. A private eye who is a horndog and a fashion plate gets stuck with a teenaged mob heiress. Together, they fight crime, although really those guys had it coming.

Written: 274 for the day, 1050/1000 for the week, 9059 overall.

Office, with burgers. Since this is our last week in this office, I piled a bunch of stuff into a sack to bring home, where I will probably throw it away.

I found my copy of the Nimona comic, which I still had, but looking through my storage room did not really reduce my urge to throw everything into the sea.

Written: 388 words again. I guess the range of possible values there is small enough that a repeat isn’t that surprising. 776 words for the week, 8785 overall.

Not sure why World Population Day is less than nine months after International Kissing Day.

Early morning meeting for the CEO to tell us how we all have to suffer because the board set higher goals than Sales could reach. No layoffs this time, though, and probably my team’s hiring will not be affected.

In Minecraft, I built a hole to the bottom of the sea with the power of SAND, but it’s very slow and uses a lot of shovels, and even though the fjord out front of my great hall is allegedly a submerged ravine, I’m not finding much in the way of mineral wealth. Also I forgot to find and watch the Minecraft Musical.

Played: Lancer. I contributed nothing and also mistook a tree stump for a giant robot, so apparently I might as well have not bothered to show up. I should probably be writing on Tuesday nights anyway.

Written: FAIL, because I was wasting time gaming.

Played: Dark Matter, for the first time in a million years. We snuck into the Abyss until we got spotted, then we charged. The giant tentacle did not make our job any easier, but it didn’t make the demons’ job easier either, because Chaotic Evil Teamwork. Then we made it to the Infinite Bureaucracy Room, so we were able to take a long rest as long as somebody filled out some forms for the desk clerk to throw into the lake of fire every so often. Level UP! (Level 7 is not that great.)

Read: Angelina (Joel Shepherd): A teenager Italian wizard-slayer comes to NYC where the last two archmages are engaged in a cold war in search of terrible revenge, but everything is way more complicated and also there’s a boy and a nefarious plot and stuff. Looks bad for pretty much everybody by the end of the volume.

Written: 119 for the day, 611/1000 for the week, 8009/10000 overall.

Weirdly, I was on call only in the morning. Customers attacked, but they could not defeat me before I escaped to do grocery shopping.

Read: Amelia the Level Zero Hero vol 1 (VA Lewis): MC got sucked into a hell dimension where she fought monsters literally 24/7 for years, so when she escapes to LitRPG World, she is already more powerful than anyone without having a class or level. Drama and cultists ensue.

Read: Ships of the Line (Terry Mixon, JN Chaney): This episode is all about ramping up the new technology obtained from an unsavory source which definitely does not have any trojan horses or other hidden bugs.

Written: 206 for the day, 492 for the weak week, 7890 total.

Accomplished nothing today, but it’s nominally okay because I’m still on vacation?

Read: Komi Can’t Communicate vol 25 (Tomohito Oda): The entire volume is a Nerf war of grade against grade, full of new characters that I cannot keep straight. Maybe I shouldn’t have started a series that was guaranteed to have at least 101 named characters.

Written: 286 for the day at week, 7684 overall. Past the three-quarters mark!

It was a nice vacation. There was a baby, who is very cute and likes stealing glasses and saying “babababaabbbbaabababa”. There was air conditioning, so we did not die when it was 42C outside. There was the traditional Chinese food and grilled stuff and splashing in the pool. There was conversation. (Our hosts recently went to Japan and returned with tales.) There was a long stretch of sitting in cars, with a brief interruption to sit on folding chairs and watch fireworks at close range. (Nonny had a comment for each one, because he hasn’t seen a lot of fireworks.) There were board games. There were so many snacks. Eventually we got our act together and returned to San Jose.

Played: Everdell. We played this twice, so I have enough data to conclude that I am terrible at this game. I’d say the dual use of cards as discardable currency pushes it into Race for the Galaxy territory, but I’m sure that’s quite right. Mostly I’m just dumb. I’m sorry, cute forest creatures!

Played: Roll for the Galaxy. I came in second, which was also last.

Played: Pandemic. We also had the On The Brink expansion, but the extra roles didn’t save us. I came in last, along with all of humanity.

Played: Sagrada. I managed to get my tableau complete, but failed on all the victory conditions, so I came in last.

Watched: I totally thought I was going to do something useful when I got home, but instead I got chicken with too many bones and watched the start of a ridiculous anime called Estab Life. It’s the cyberpunk fantasy future, everybody has to live in their cultural burbclave, cute girl shadowrunners help them defect in pursuit of their unapproved dreams.

Written: FAIL. I had my laptop, and my current draft is in Dropbox, so I could have written, yet I did not. Pretty sure I can still make my overall goal, although this may not be my strongest week.

I’m not writing this until the 5th, so I don’t remember what, if anything, I did today. I think I bought a sandwich for lunch, because it’s Too Hot and then died in a sweltering pit. Also probably I packed for tomorrow. And read the new batch of short SF commissioned by Amazon to entice people to Kindle Unlimited.

Read: “The Long Game” (Ann Leckie): A squishy short-lived species is oppressed by capitalist humans, but possibly not forever.

Read: “How It Unfolds” (James SA Corey): When you copy yourself, the copies all have the same history with the same people, but maybe they don’t have to have the same future.

Read: “Void” (Veronica Roth): Murder mystery in the locked room of a relativistic passenger liner. It may only shuttle between Sol and Centauri, but the time adds up…

Read: “Falling Bodies” (Rebecca Roanhorse): A young human is stuck between the colonialist aliens that conquered humanity and the human resistance.

Read: “Just Out of Jupiter’s Reach” (Nnedi Okorafor): Seven people given bonded bioships meet for a week after five years of solitude. Actually I expected even more drama.

Read: “Slow Time Between The Stars” (John Scalzi): An AI capable of managing a sub-relativistic journey might not be as much like its human creators as they hoped. I suspect the AI was based on engrams from my friend Dave.

Written: 562 today, 1982/1000 for the week, 7398/1000 overall.

We went to the park to see Jus’s Shakespeare camp production of Twelfth Night, Abridged Cowboy Version. Obviously she was brilliant, but also it was 897582 degrees outside so we all died and I didn’t come back to life until Marith came over for pizza and anime.

Watched: Mob Psycho 100 3.9-12: This time, Mob must face… his own heart! The end (of season 3).

Read: Micchi vs The New World vol 4 (Jammin’ Rabbit aka Tony Huo): We finally find out why the long-lost senpai of the main character has been doing all these terrible things, and everything is resolved. Also a lot of people get severely clobbered because seriously, don’t fuck with Micchi. The end.

Written: Only 176, but that’s more than my daily goal, and brings me to 1420 for the week, 6836 overall. More than 2/3 of the way to my 10-week goal!

Went to the office again, so Former Coworker A could meet up with us for Costco food court lunch, which people had been trying to do for weeks in memory of the old days. Costco is only a block form the office, so I guess in the old days before we had fancy bribes to get people in the office like delivered lunch, everybody would go to Costco for pizza and hotdogs.

Now I am on vacation.

Read: Kelcie Murphy and the Academy for the Unbreakable Arts (Erika Lewis): 12-year-old with special parentage and secret magical powers finds out she’s going to magical fighting school, weird teachers, puppy love, war in the magical world, Celtic mythology edition. Some disability representation, more authentic modern-orphan backstory. Doesn’t seem entirely well-edited.

Written: 419 today, 1244 for the week, 6660 overall.

After sleeping in forever like a stupid lump, I went over to play Minecraft. I ran into the wilderness, then burrowed into the depths of the Earth in search of dripstone, then died horribly in burning lava. After that Nonny switched to Geometry Dash for his Youtube channel, so Ayse and I made our own world. We have bamboo and a verdant cave and a house that’s more or less zombie-proof and a desert village right next door and a paddock to lure animals into. After that, we ate delicious pork chile verde that Jus and Ken made and then I came home to write.

Written: 578 words, for a total of 2035 this week and 5416 overall. Only three weeks out of ten and I’m already halfway to my goal!

Didn’t accomplish much of anything today, although I did go shopping early enough to successfully get more quarters.

Read: Minami’s Lover (Shungiku Uchida): A somewhat strange manga about a girl who shrinks to 1/12 scale and secretly lives in her boyfriend’s room with him. Did not have the ending I was expecting.

Read: Prison of Sleep (Tim Pratt): Conclusion to The Doors of Sleep, in which everything is explained. I got confused by the parallel narratives, and not less confused when they joined, but I think that was just me. Probably also me that I liked traveling through all the different worlds during the setup phase of the story than I liked narrowing down to the conclusion. Although I seem to recall not being impressed with previous Pratt endings.

Written: I could not get my brain going until it was time to go to bed, but then I squeezed out 189 words. 1457 for the week, 4838 overall.

On call for special customers from 7-19 again, so I didn’t go into the office. Coworker K is back from getting married. Young people these days, I swear.

Work was okay, if blah, but then as soon as I wanted to do my own stuff on my own computer, my keyboard completely freaked out. Whichever function key shrinks the windows so they all fit nonoverlapping on the screen kept spamming as long as the keyboard was switched on, so now I’m back to my old keyboard, with the dodgy C key and the however-many-years’ accumulation of grot. Not sure how writing is going to go.

Read: The Dos and Donuts of Love (Adiba Jaigirdar): A Bangaladeshi-Irish girl enters a baking competition reality TV show. There is star-crossed gay romance! Donut-shop rivalry! Intrigue! Betrayal! Racism! Only a little fat-phobia and hardly any homophobia, though.

Written: 256 today, 1268 for the week, 4649 total. I guess that was okay.