Category: Life of a Space Parasite

I seem to be much less sick today, so I went to gaming. I did not die from walking, so that’s good. I guess. I did have a fright when it seemed my phone had died a week after my pad died, but actually it just somehow to glitched to the lowest brightness setting, and when I got somewhere without direct sunlight I was able to set it back.

Played: Dark Matter. Nobody was very focused, so all we did was planning for a ridiculous quest that we got in exchange for Jaseen’s body not falling off. Ridiculous like “ahahahahaha you fools are actually going to try that?!”. It’ll be great. Maybe Jus will join us, although she might have to play Ninja Goat.

Read: Katalepsis ch 11.1-14, ch 12.1-6 (Hungry): They just can’t get away from those guys, even in [SPOILER], although maybe they can drive a wedge between them. I dunno, maybe trying to obliquely summarize each  chapter is pointless, I should just say I still really like it.

Written: FAIL. Energy flagging.

Ugh, I don’t want to be sick. But I am anyway, so at least I didn’t have to feel bad about staying in bed until mid-afternoon.

Read: 6 Times We Almost Kissed (And One Time We Did) (Tess Sharpe): Two girls take years and years to admit they love each other, although to be fair there is a lot of drama with their moms and rural medical access and whatnot.

Written: 173.

The meeting I have to have facts for is cancelled, so I can save my facts for later.

Watched: My Hero Academia 6.7-6.9: Well, this is going about as well as one might fear. But Aizawa is METAL AS FUCK.

Read: Katalepsis ch 10.1-10 (Hungry): Wow, that guy is obnoxious.

Written: Eternal FAIL. Unless you count recreating D&D character sheets, which I wouldn’t. Maybe creating them the first time.

No training meeting today, so I didn’t get to be either smart or dumb. I did accomplish a few of the things I meant to do yesterday, though. I also got a new task, which was to ask the pharmacist whether I need to replace the refrigerated prescription that got left out all night. Sounds like not, but I’ll call the manufacturer tomorrow to make sure that the expiration date on the box really does assume room temp.

Read: Katalepsis ch 9.1-13 (Hungry): Everything is better with more monsters living in your house, right?

Written: FAIL.

 

I meant to do a whole bunch of things today, and accomplished zero (0) of them. No, that’s not true, I did get to the drugstore, so that’s one (1) thing accomplished. I guess technically that’s a win? Doesn’t seem like it.

Read: Katalepsis ch 7.1-15, ch 8.1-6 (Hungry): Wow, MC definitely has A Type. But most of her friends don’t fit it so this doesn’t seem likely to become a harem story. Anyway there’s probably too much murdering for that.

Written: Still FAIL.

Happy Discount Candy Eve to all who celebrate!

Played: Lancer. Finally we finished escaping the Cave of Infinite Robots, but Droid’s mech got completely trashed. It was a little embarrassing, but there were a lot of enemies, so whatever. Sadly, we probably cannot steal the printers that made the infinite robots and will have to follow the leads we got to the next stage of the adventure.

Read: Victory’s Bright Dawn (Eric Thomson): Fourth book in the series, main character has gotten upgraded to a larger and less rules-oriented ship, but humans are still the problem.

Read: Katalepsis ch 6.1-9 (Hungry): More friends does mean more problems, yes, but MC is taking a few steps in the direction of her end goal.

Written: FAIL.

 

Monday the 13th, most accursed of days! Unsurprisingly, my iPad did not come back to life, so I had to trek down to the Apple store. I got Popeye’s in the food court while I was waiting, and it wasn’t bad. Eventually I got a time slot and the technician tried to make my pad live again but could not, concluding that it’s the board rather than the battery. Since it’s ancient and out of warranty, I had to replace it with a shiny new one. I guess it’s good to be up to date, but I’m not sure what I think of this face ID thing, and now I need two kinds of charging cables. Magnetic pencil is nice, though.

Read: Like Stars in Heaven (Eric Thomson): Third in the missiles-in-space series. As usual, the conquering space orcs are far less of a threat to humanity than humans are.

Read: Katalepsis ch 5.1-8 (Hungry): Finally, we get to see some of Evelyn’s backstory and yes, it’s just as terrible as she made it sound. Also Praem is getting weird.

Written: FAIL.

Hm, my pad suddenly shut down and won’t start up or reboot even after charging for a while. That seems bad.

Ayse is feeling better, so I went with her & Ken & fam to Korean barbecue and became extremely full of meat. So much meat. My body is composed of at least 80% meat now.

Read: Katalepsis ch 2.7-12, 3.1-13, 4.1-7 (Hungry): Romance, rival magicians, assorted monsters both under the control of rival mages and not, terrifying extra-dimensional spaces, violence by means of magic, self-harm as a side effect of magic, more cute friends. All the important positive characters are women or at least female-identifying. I approve.

Written: Despite not having a pad to distract me, FAIL.

Played Etherfields with Ken and Dave, but not Ayse because she is sick. It has a lot of pieces, even in the tutorial, but so far is relatively comprehensible. There is a lot of it, too. Then I went to sushi with Ken and Jus, because she got a 4.0 GPA and deserves a celebration. Good work, Jus!

Read: The Agartha Loop second ed ch 1.8-1.35, 2.1-2.6 (RavensDagger): I didn’t diff the text, but it’s pretty similar to the first edition, except that it hasn’t caught up to the same point.

Read: Katalepsis ch 1.1-5, ch 2.1-6 (Hungry): Our main character has spent a decade believing she’s schizophrenic after imagining a twin sister and having a massive psychotic break, but as soon as she goes off to college, she meets a hot lady who tells her the monsters aren’t hallucinatory. Not explicitly Mythos, but lots of references. Extremely gay.

 Written: 114.

I tried to do work today, but I was pretty bad at it.

Read: The Black Stone (ed Raffaele Pezzella):Anthology of Mythos stories, some of them okay, some of them fairly bad, none outstanding.

Read: Nemesis of Mars (Glynn Stewart): 13th(?) book of the magic-missiles-in-space series. The hero of the first half of the series gets a chance to go back into the field along with the heroine of the second half (his protege) and is still pretty terrifying, but not unexpectedly so.

Written: 122.

 

I didn’t get to talk too much in training (or even attend at all) because there were customers all over the place. Probably for the best.

Read: An Immense World (Ed Yong): Ed Yong writes about animal senses and umwelten and it is amazing. Biology is so weird and humans are such a tiny, nonrepresentative sample of it. I didn’t take good notes, but I need to go back and write down a zillion biology facts for the alternate-Friday meeting.

Written: FAIL. Maybe I should just go back to writing kitten words which are fluffy and have no plot and only barely continuity.

I guess I did a work somewhat successfully? Nah, probably not. I’ve never done anything that was actually successful, I’m pretty sure.

Read: MonsTABOO vol 1 (Yuya Takahashi, TALI): Sometimes grownups turn into monsters, most of which are serial killers but some of which just want to be left alone. A middle-school girl whose life was ruined by monsters gets mixed up in all this and takes up with an apparently non-terrible monster. Violence ensues. They better not off Capybara Guy!

Written: FAIL.

Played: Lancer. Finally a fight that isn’t just last-mech-standing! We made it all the way to back of the battlefield before the security system started launching robots at us, and had to keep them off Abrakyl while she rifled the suspicious database, and now we have to escape with her findings. It would probably be working better if I had retreated instead of charging into the stream.

Written: FAIL.

Weekly reminder that you don’t hate Mondays, you hate capitalism. At least on this Monday, I have leftover banana bread and cornbread to raise morale.

Read: Dandadan vol 1 (Yukinobu Tatsu): She believes in spirits but not in UFOs. He believes in UFOs but not spirits. One ill-considered dare later, they’re entangled with weirdly horny examples of each and everything is insane.

Read: The Agartha Loop second ed ch 1.1-1.7 (RavensDagger): So far, much the same as the first edition, but hopefully it won’t stop a little ways into the second loop.

Written: 212 words.

Played: Dark Matter. We’re just trying to walk a couple of miles to take a long rest at the Lawful Good faction’s clubhouse, and so far we’ve had two fights with demons and teamed up with one group of barnyard animals from the Abyss who all have musical numbers. The players got banana bread and singing GMs instead of singing goats in berets.

Read: The Agartha Loop first ed ch 2.1-2.15 (RavensDagger): Apparently this is a discontinued version and there’s a new edition! I guess I’ll go read that.

Written: 235 words.

Managed to get up and look in Marith’s car for my phone and go grocery shopping with my phone, somehow. Then I wobbled around all day until Marith came over for anime and Chinese food.

Watched: My Hero Academia 6.5-6: The fight continues, although it’s moved into a new phase now that the villains have way more damage output.

Read: Colorless vol 1 (KENT): Mysterious solar flare mutated everybody and blasted almost all color from the world, now the mutants are fighting over what color remains and how to use it to rule the world or not. The blurb calls it noir, but it’s really more like Batman.

Read: Namekawa-san Won’t Take a Licking vol 1 (Rie Ato): The title sounds like it could be yuri smut, but really it’s just nonconsensual sliminess. Boo.

Read: Vigor Mortis ch 175-181 (Thundamoo): Now I am caught up. Allegedly there are only twenty or so chapters remaining, which seems plausible. I think the endpoint is probably continental domination.

Read: The Agartha Loop ch 1-35 (RavensDagger): Magical girls with military backup, monsters, parallel universes, time travel, gay romance, and of course time loops. Chapter 35 is where it comes back around to the beginning, so I figured that was a good stopping place for tonight.

Written: FAIL and more FAIL.

 

Finally it was time to see Jus on stage! It was a very abridged version of The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, but Jus got to be the off-screen voice of the housekeeper and also a skunk in Aslan’s army so she could fight the person she likes. No word on whether she got to drag them off to her lair. Good job, Jus!

When I tried to go to bed, I could not find my phone anywhere. Hopefully it is in Marith’s car and not on the theater floor or something.

Read: Vigor Mortis ch 136-174 (Thundamoo): Continuing transhumanism, mutation, soul editing, extradimensional assholes, super-evil viewpoint characters, super-evil antagonists, etc.

Written: FAIL.

 

Some kind of city inspectors came by to make sure I have fire alarms and stuff, which was fine, although from the way the apartment manager kept apologizing, I gather a lot of people are not okay with it. The inalienable right to die pointlessly in an escapable fire is enshrined in the Constitution, I guess.

Read: Vigor Mortis ch 44-104 (Thundamoo): More monstrous transformations, monstrous behavior, blasphemy, murder, mind control, religious conversion, political intrigue, etc.

Written: FAIL.

Quarterly review at work. Apparently we have a new system, where when you do the things, you get the points, and if you have enough points at the end of the quarter, you don’t have to go into the crocodile pit. Also I managed to confess that kubernetes is not doing it for me, so somebody more compatible will be given all the cases.

Played: Lancer. I was able to contribute a lot more to the fight once I stop not contributing, and of course we won without being hardly at all destroyed. But all the printers are offline, so we can’t repair much before being sent off to find out who invaded the university and explain the error of their ways.

Written: FAIL.

After failing to go grocery shopping yesterday, I managed to do it today, but then sank back into the sludgy depths.

Read: Eyes of the Void (Adrian Tchaikovsky): Sequel to Shards of Earth, in which our characters go to even stranger and more terrifying places, find out more about the problem (not revealed to the reader), and cannot get away from each other. Since the whole series has been about of the mystery of why the world-destroying monsters destroy worlds, I hope we get to find it out pretty soon.

Read: “How I Stole the Princess’s White Knight and Turned Him To Villainy: Miracle 2” (AJ Sherwood): We get to meet the evil sorcerer’s siblings, who are just as wacky, but the monster does not get a speaking role.

Read: Vigor Mortis ch 1-43 (Thundamoo): As expected, a story about a probably-neurodivergent girl turning into a monster and doing murders. This one is street rat in a secondary world who is becoming some kind of soul-hacker and zombie queen. This may constitute stealing souls from God. There are a lot of murders and mind control and puberty and other traumatic events.

Written: FAIL.

I didn’t accomplish anything today, but I did visit friends and search for the lost art of conversation and eat cheese fondue, salad, chocolate fondue, and German chocolate cake and get hugs and play Goose Goose Duck. I’m pretty sure the conversations other people had while I was playing video games with kids were better than the ones I had, but I got some good book recommendations. It was a nice evening, and now that we’ve had fondue, it can officially be 2023.

Written: FAIL.

Spent almost the entire day and then some on a customer call. I hear they got things working after I left.

Marith came over to watch anime and eat Cheese Disk, which used up all the rest of my brain.

Watched: My Hero Academia 6.3-4: Yep, this fight (to be fair, it’s on two fronts so far and may expand) is going to take up the whole season, isn’t it?

Read: The Drowned Lands (Benjamin Sperduto): Adventure in the doomed post-apocalyptic age between Cthulhu destroying civilization and reshaping the Earth’s surface and him actually waking up. Cultists and rain everywhere, magical artifacts, theocracy, inevitable doom.

Read: The Atlas of the Latter Earth (Kevin Crawford): The default setting for Worlds Without Number, in a fair amount of detail. It seems like too much detail to me, but it’s not like I don’t know the urge to keep creating, and many of the bits are pretty good. Also it’s for OSR, so I guess detail is expected?

Read: The Path of Duty (Eric Thomson): Second in a missiles-in-space series with very old-fashioned space navy and unending corruption which is the real enemy. It’s clear the invading aliens would not be a problem if humanity could get anything together to fight them instead of treating the entire war as a profiteering opportunity.

Written: FAIL.

Not so many meetings today. Not so much gaming, either.

Read: World War Cthulhu (ed Brian M Sammons, Glynn Owen Barrass): Encounters with the Mythos in time of war, or at least by soldiers. Troy, Vietnam, American Revolution, Cold War, some wars yet to come, but no Gulf War or Afghanistan, by which I conclude that the authors are not just mostly white guys, but old white guys. I guess that’s thematically fitting for Lovecraft. One good thing about wars (well, not the Trojan War) is that they have lots of explosives, which as we know is the best way to take out monsters, but many of the protagonists come to sticky ends.

Read: “Haley and the Town of Refuge” (MCA Hogarth): Series finale, even more theologically-inclined than the previous installments because the very Christian protagonist has to make a weighty decision. Everyone continues to be well-intentioned and full of good food, though.

Read: “Coffee, Milk & Spider Silk” (Coyote JM Edwards): In a town full of fantasy races, but with modern Internet service, a drider cop retires to open a coffee shop and faces non-fantastic problems like trying to get people to come drink her coffee, difficult baristas, and a lack of talent for latte art. No idea whether this was written before or after Legends & Lattes.

Written: 147.

So many meetings, starting actually before sunrise. Ugh. Ugh. Ugh.

Played: Lancer. Back at base and doing downtime activities after the last mission, the PCs are suddenly assaulted by random mechs! Or at least the university (“university” to Abrakyl and Shoutao, who mock their excessive use of IRBs) is assaulted and the PCs are the only ones with mechs handy. I tried to do the teamwork thing of staying by the defender mech that can protect me with its memes, but this seems to be a losing proposition without ranged attacks.

Read: Rodeo Clown chapter 11 (Marith): At long last, the climactic battle between evil and other, more shippable, evil!

Written: FAIL.

“Weekly reminder that you don’t hate Mondays, you hate capitalism.”

Read: The Bloodship Returns (Dirk Leichty): “ALL THE ROCKET KINGDOMS believed the vampires forever fallen, ALL memory of their galactic imperium lost to legend… But from darkest night it drifted: the Bloodship, thirsty, carving a path of carnage toward desolate Mars, the abandoned seat of lost dominion. And you among the unlucky captives trawled into the ship’s sloshing bowel…” A minimal system and a lot of brightly-colored maps and strange illustrations for crawling through the Bloodship. The visuals hurt my neurons, but the sketches of worldbuilding are intriguing.

Written: 126 words, which is kind of like more than 100, but not really.

Managed to do a grand total of zero things today.

Read: Dead Tired vol 1 (RavensDagger): A lich, having exhausted the possibilities of vivisecting gods and plumbing the deep structure of his litRPG universe, goes into hibernation to wait for something interesting to happen and is rudely awakened to find that the genre has changed to cultivation fantasy and he does not approve. The viewpoint character is thus mostly terrible puns and trampling over everything in his way, but he rapidly accumulates a retinue of more interesting yet equally ridiculous characters.

Written: Fail fail faillity fail.

I made it to grocery shopping, but that’s about it.

Read: Bioshifter ch 34-45 (Thundamoo): Switched to reading on Patreon, now I’m really completely caught up. Hannah is still a complete mess internally, but that is not stopping her from being terrifying and getting things done. Possibly these things are hastening the destruction of two or more universes, though.

Read: The Two of Them Are Pretty Much Like This vol 1 (Takashi Ikeda): Slice of life of an adult lesbian couple. Very chill, mostly about their home life and not much about working in the anime industry (one is a voice actress, one is a scriptwriter).

Written: 180 words. Meh.