Category: Life of a Space Parasite

Pocket frond got me a good fact about the horrors of the deep to use in the fortnightly meeting (dolphins use pufferfish to get high). I had some more facts, which I have now forgotten so I better find them and write them down.

Marith somehow did not murder her entire management chain, so she was not in jail and could come over to eat Cheese Disk and watch anime.

Watched: My Hero Academia smiling graffiti artist and then the first two episodes of season six. Marith complained a lot about their bad tactics, which was mostly pretty legit, although I think in many cases there were reasons for doing it the way they did (like, not being actual military).

Read: Bioshifter ch 16-33 (Thundamoo): More mutation and murder and trauma and bad religion and secrets and cute girls and trauma. This is as much as has been posted on Royal Road, so I was able to stop reading and die in a pit for now.

Written: FAIL. I just really kind of suck at this whole “writing” thing.

Read: Hive Minds Give Good Hugs ch 42-53 (ThundaMoo): Wow, it actually concluded instead of running for ten thousand episodes, and wrapped up and everything. That was pretty swell, although full of doom and anxiety and moral dilemmas and planetary [SPOILER].

Read: Bioshifter ch 1-7 (Thundamoo) : Started the next story, which is not related but also has anxiety and transformations and gayness an d mystery. No amnesia, though.

Written: 185 words.

Back to work. At least Friday is closer than it may appear in mirror.

Played: Lancer. We finished the battle against the migrating radioactive robots, and then handwaved the many fights we were going to have to have against all the other people in the Triangle before we could persuade them that downloading illegal technology from the omninet is a bad idea even if you’re then going to take it to an unaligned world before experimenting with it. Level UP.

Written: FAIL.

It was not, in fact, okay that I stayed up until 2:00. But if I have to completely waste a day, at least this is a good day for it.

In the evening, Marith came over and we (re)watched the last episode of My Hero Academia S5, and the ridiculous baseball OVA, and ate some balsamic chicken stuff. It was like human contact, at least more so than playing Slay the Spire for 873 hours in a row.

Written: 328 words.

 

It’s Friday the 13th and yet I have no black cats! But I have teeth and electricity and Internets, so I guess it’s okay.

Today I finally started playing Slay the Spire, after Ken recommended it ages ago and I  bought it for iPad one age ago. It’s a deck-building rogue-like, which combines two things I like but am bad at, so it should be no surprise that it’s addictive and I’m completely terrible at it.

I checked that the grocery store is open on Monday, so I don’t need to go shopping tomorrow, which makes it completely okay to stay up until midnight 1:00 2:00, right?

Written: 193 words.

Took the afternoon off for dentistry, which turned out to be more dentistry than I had remembered, but now I have a shiny new crown for chomping.

Read: Family Ties (BR Kingsolver): This reminded me of the Amber books a little, interdimensional family intrigue with magic and extensive murders, in a matter-of-fact tone. It is more generic fantasy, though, with elves and goblins and pretty generic magic.

Read: Trolled (Lindsay Buroker): Also dwarves and elves and orcs, but in modern Seattle. Third book of the series and the protagonist is definitely falling hard for the guy she has extremely valid reasons to not trust, even though he hasn’t betrayed her yet and also is a good kisser.

Read: The Scarab Mission (James L Cambias): Set in the same far-future, slightly Orion’s Arm-inspired, solar system as The Godel Operation (which I inexplicably failed to record reading, probably because it was over the holidays and I am very stupid), with one overlapping character. This is more like survival horror than action-adventure, scavengers on a dead hab that might not be entirely empty.

Written: 124 words. I count anything above 100 as “not zero”, so…

Power went out at 2 this morning, and didn’t come back until after 15, so I spent a lot of the day wandering around trying to find a place to work from. All the coffee shops were full of WFHers, so I ended up in the Campbell Express Library, but it is teeny and had only a chair, no power. When I ran out of battery, I got lunch and then went to the nice big coffee shop in downtown Campbell, which by that time did have some room and some power outlets, and also coworker S from my previous job! It was very surprising and also nice to see her.

I was afraid the power was going to be out for ages, because the outage page never gave an ETA, but it was because they couldn’t be arsed to tell us, not because they didn’t know, and suddenly I got the notification that power was restored so I trundled home to sit with my electricity and my hydration and my computer.

For whatever reason, I did not sleep well without power (lack of fan noise?) but I was still somewhat productive.

Played: Lancer. Once again, downloading supertech off the space internet turns out to be a bad idea (except when Abrakyl does it, obviously), and we had to chase down the parts of somebody’s base, which had turned into a swarm of weird little robots and wandered off. They were extremely annoying little robots, so we’re looking forward to next week when Tinca will be there with her area-effect missiles.

Written: FAIL, only gaming.

I went outside, twice, and never got rained on. Go me!

Played: Dark Matter. We finally discovered the mysterious secret at the heart of the asteroid (it’s a hellaspud), but then we talked our way out of getting our memories wiped and/or being spaced, so I guess the campaign will continue. The librarian turned out to be an actual fiend, much to Sesamina’s dismay.

Written: 229 words.

I went grocery shopping, answered one question from a coworker, and leveled up my Dark Matter characters for tomorrow.

Read: Stray Cat Strut ch 5.1-35 (RavensDagger): Oh no, now I’m caught up!

Read: Red Equinox (Douglas Wynne): Modern-day Mythos adventure, has some good spooky description, but there’s apparently some sort of counter-force to the Mythos, which is a wimpout for cosmic horror.

Read: Lever Action ch 1-23 (RavensDagger): Fantasy Western with D&D races plus mecha. It’s not clear how much colonialism is going on as opposed to warfare between existing inhabitants, but meh.

Written: Ongoing FAIL.

Company is open for business as usual, so we all had to be there at the usual time, and the customers were there too. Not in force, at least, and the early Tuesday meeting seems to have been dropped for now. We have two new coworkers who will be doing a specialized thing, but I don’t know whether they’re cool yet.

Read: Stray Cat Strut ch 1.27-77, 2.1-8 (RavensDagger): Our heroine not only survived but was reunited with her girlfriend and family, and then got a quest from a fellow participant in the alien points scheme.

Played: Lancer. Finished the fight fairly quickly, found out unregulated NHPs were involved (which made Abrakyl and Early happy), then found out some people are onto other people, which might be us or might be somebody else. But the people we defeated let us use their printer to fix up our mechs, so that’s all good.

Written: FAIL.

Back to the answer mines! I wasn’t at work today, but I was on call. The thing for the customer was finished during my shift, so I got to announce it to them, and will take all credit for it.

Also managed to go grocery shopping this morning, which made me hate life and time but otherwise worked fine and I should be able to eat almost every day until Saturday.

Read: Stray Cat Strut ch 1-26 (RavensDagger): Dystopian cyberpunk future in which hungry aliens invade and allegedly benevolent aliens pick people to enroll in the kill-invaders-in-exchange-for-hyper-technology program. Feels a little like a video game in that guns and medical gear and cyberware appear out of nowhere the instant points are spent, but there isn’t any more to the system than that, so I’m not sure it counts as LitRPG.

Read: Butts: A Backstory (Heather Radke): A little bit about butts physically (bipedalisms, endurance hunting, etc) and a lot about butts socially, from the Hottentot Venus to Twerking on Tiktok. Spoiler: the answer is always sexism, and usually misogynoir.

Read: The Girl I Like Forgot Her Glasses vol 1 (Koume Fujichika): Therefore she has to lean in really close to share the male lead’s textbook, which is hard on an innocent manga boy’s heart. Cute, but very slight, and the female lead seems to mostly exist to be klutzy.

Written: 157 words. Two days in a row!

I don’t think I did anything whatsover today. Just stupid pad games and web serials.

Read: Hive Minds Give Good Hugs ch 1-41 (ThundaMoo): Starts off stranded on an alien planet with amnesia and major anxiety, gets even more traumatic but with increasing lack of human frailty and limitations from there. What could go wrong with nigh-infinite power? A whole lot, as it turns out.

Written: 304 words.

Got up way too early at a sensible hour for the cleaners, then went back to bed, then got woken up by Ken texting that he is still sick and NYE fondue party is cancelled. Festive food was a 90-minute wait and it was raining out, so I stayed home and ate food from the fridge and did nothing. I was on call in the afternoon, but nothing happened.

Read: Love Crafted ch 45-80 (RavensDagger): The end! Pretty abrupt and the commenters didn’t like it, but whatever. Omnipotent tentacles can only go so long without solving the Inquisition problem for good.

Read: Dreamer’s Ten-Tea-Cle Café ch 1-44 (RavensDagger): Spin-off, mostly for the purpose of crossovers with other web serials, but also to follow the personal development of Dreamer’s pamphlet-distributing clone.

Written: FAIL. No more words for 2022.

Got up before noon, although not significantly more useful today than the rest of the week.

Read: Yakuza Reincarnation vol 4 (Hiroki Miyashita, Takeshi Natsuhara): Our old old- school yakuza isekai’d into the body of a teenage princess continues to clobber people and demons who do crime wrong and befriend people who do crime right, this time including pirates. mermaids, and dwarves.

Read: Cinnamon Bun ch 330-371 (RavensDagger): Oh no, I’m caught up! Fortunately there is obviously a lot more mostly-wholesome adventure still to come.

Read: Love Crafted ch 1-44 (RavensDagger): An aspiring magic school student uses an off-brand summoning spell and ends up with a relative of Azathoth, who fortunately only wants cuddles, hugs, snuggles, naps, and the occasional nap. Somewhat incoherent because it was guided by reader votes while it was being written

Written: Unending FAIL.

Wasted the whole day either abed or reading web serials again. Managed to step out in the evening to look for steamed pork buns, but neither the Chinese restaurant I normally go nor the sketchy-seeming one near Marith’s work had them, so I ended up with pizza slices instead. They were okay, but not what I really wanted.

Yes, I am aware that being unproductive is a powerful anticapitalist action, but 1) I want to do my own stuff, not work, and 2) that only applies to other people anyway.

Read: I’m the Evil Lord of an Intergalactic Empire vol 1 (Kai Nadashima, Yomu Mishima, Nadare Takamine): The isekai MC, having died broke, betrayed, and alone on Earth, determines to make the worst (for everyone else) of being reincarnated as the ruler of a planet, and the entity that reincarnated him is entirely in favor of this plan, but somehow he’s not being a terrible ruler or a terrible person.

Read: Cinnamon Bun ch 269-329 (RavensDagger): Time to grind the Hugging skill! And save the world by telling people to stop being so mean.

Written: Continued FAIL.

With nothing on the schedule, I ended up sleeping until after noon and then not doing anything at all, because I fundamentally suck. I guess I did manage to go grocery shopping, but that hardly counts.

Read: Cinnamon Bun ch 194-268 (RavensDagger): Continuing wholesome adventures. The wand of cure hysteria has shown up a few more times, but nobody can bear to explain what it actually is to the MC, so she continues on in innocence, leaving appalled expressions in her wake (which is what she does most of the time, regardless of whether any magic items are involved, because PCs).

Written: FAIL.

Due to a massive failure of vacation-scheduling on my part, I had to work today, but customers were relatively undemanding.

Read: Cinnamon Bun ch 67-193 (RavensDagger): Continued LitRPG adventures of a very innocent teenager and assorted friends. It’s not her fault she has to commit the worst crimes imaginable!

Written: Apparently people on Royal Road write a million words a year. That’s like 3000 words per day, or about two NaNoWriMos per month, every single month. I can barely write 3000 words in a month! Probably less, if I keep staying up until 2:00 reading.

Or, this year, “Christmas (observed)”. I thought about going grocery shopping but instead did absolutely nothing.

Watched: The School for Good and Evil: Apparently I read the book several years ago, but either I don’t remember any of it, or the movie is heavily modified, but it was entertaining anyway. Who even needs Gryffindors and Ravenclaws anyway? (Not that the Hufflepuffs would want anything to do with the Evers and their fake goodness.)

Read: The Maid I Hired Recently is Mysterious vol 4 (Wakame Konbu): It’s good to see the maid’s schtick breaking down in the face of growing feelings.

Written: FAIL.

And a Nifty Newtonmas to all!

Marith and I went over to Monkeycat Towers for dinner and presents and children and happiness, and it was very nice. Earl and Cat were also there, so we had morbid dinner conversation because we’re a bunch of weirdos. I did not get any presents in wrapping paper, but I did get delicious food, delightful company, and the Hug Assortment Pack. Also we played some Goose Goose Duck, which is like Among Us with more complicated maps and more character roles. I did not manage to be so sus that I got spaced even when that was my victory condition, which was a little disappointing.

Read: Icebreaker (Glynn Stewart): Standalone fantasy of a kind that used to be more common. Not sure about some of the worldbuilding (that seems like an awful lot of information loss), but I enjoyed it anyway.

Written: FAIL.

Stayed in bed forever, gave Marith her eggs and milk so she can make brownies and hot chocolate, wrapped a bunch of presents. The roll of wrapping paper I bought like five years ago hasn’t run out, and was almost wide enough to wrap the big present, so I guess next year’s presents will look very similar to this year’s.

Read: A Very Meowy Christmas (Zoe Chant): An extremely goopy book by the Kit part of Zoe Chant. There is one (1) bad thing that happens in this book and it is off-screen and several years in the past. Otherwise, everything is wonderful, and arguably the HEA starts around chapter 2. If you want to be full of cynicism, this is not the book for you. It even addresses one point I’ve wondered about with the Fated Mates trope, although not in a way that makes it any more palatable to heartless killjoys.

Written: 133 words.

Hurray, I’m on vacation! Boo, I’m on call!

The customers were worse than I hoped, but not nearly as bad as I feared, and I wasn’t even on call until after I managed to go grocery shopping and get lunch, so I guess it wasn’t that bad.

Read: The Grand Conspiracy (Terry Mixon, JN Chaney): This volume is all about inter-human conflict because there’s a break in the alien onslaught, and what human would work with other humans to survive when instead they could die with slightly more toys than that other guy?

Read: Holstaurus Magic (Warren Thomas): Extremely raunchy smut. Not really LitRPG even though set in a VRMMORPG. Does cater to certain specific interests, but there is a lot of regular banging too.

Read: Komi Can’t Communicate vol 22 (Tomohito Oda): Further NYC adventures. Also, only 22 volumes into the series, Komi is communicating almost entirely in speech! Whispers, but definite speech, not writing!

Written: FAIL. No brain.

 

Last work day of the year week! Except for tomorrow, when I’m on call in the afternoon and have no idea what customer activity will be like.

We exposed the new manager to the weekly technical training meeting. He may be reconsidering his life choices.

I think I have all the presents I planned on-hand and just need to wrap them. Except that I’m sure I’ve forgotten someone/something and it will all turn out terrible.

Read: Azarinth Healer vol 1 (Rhaegar): A young kickboxer gets isekaied and ends up with a mysterious OP class that enables her in pursuing her favorite activities in a new world: fighting, training, fighting, eating, fighting, sleeping, fighting, sex, fighting, and fighting. Not everybody is as nigh-invincible as her, though, so there is also some trauma. There is not particularly any plot.

Written: 206 words.