Category: Life of a Space Parasite

Played: Lancer. It turned out to be grey goo after all, but it was imitating normal matter and assimilating it. Also we had gotten sent three days into the past to avert the catastrophe, which was really confusing when we thought the time discrepancy was part of what was happening in the base. We put the grey goo ghost of the mad scientist into a jar (Dave swears he wasn’t listening to Jus’s game yesterday), which caused the base computer to freak out and send the big guns after us. This fight had lots of burn and lots of area denial, but by complete coincidence (Dave swears) there was a Full Service Robot Wash as one of the features of the battlefield and it didn’t get blown up until it had been used to negate burn a couple of times. The lava pit never did get used, but we were definitely worried about it. The battle ended with ASK punching the last enemy down to a few hit points, Kappa stomping toward it using each of her weapons as she got within range to get it down to a single hit point, and then Lena popping out of her completely destroyed mech to finish it off with her personal weapon. After that, we talked down the base and found the Horus connection, which in fact is all over ASK’s and Lena’s mechs. This was agreed to be the most climactic of all our battles, and Dave is getting tired of running Lancer, so we’ll switch to something else. Not sure what, people have to bring suggestions next fornight, or maybe to Rachel’s party next weekend.

Written: 255 words, for a final weekly total of 4447/3000. Next week looks pretty dismal, though.

Ayse has a cold, so Marith didn’t want to visit, and I was on call so I couldn’t make long bus trips. It was very sad. Especially for Ayse!

Played: Jus ran a thing! I was a crow spirit, Marith was a disgraced apprentice jeweler, we hunted ghosts! The little kid ghost was very sad, but we did the thing you do with sad ghosts. Jus is probably as good of a GM as I was in college.

Read: Legends & Lattes (Travis Baldree): An orcish adventurer retires to open the coffee shop of her dreams, which is harder than it should be because some people are jerks.

Written: 776 kitten words = 4192/3000. I don’t seem to be writing other things, do I?

The alarm saved me from a dream (memory? prophecy?) in which I was the least prepared and most boring GM ever, probably turning the teenagers I was running for off gaming for their entire lives.

Read: “Any Way The Wind Blows” (Seanan McGuire): Reread. Airship, alternate worlds, magic or maybe magitech, and the Flatiron Building. (Because why not suck up to Tor?)

Read: “In Mercy, Rain” (Seanan McGuire): Another from the Wayward Children series, how the girl who got sucked into a world of vampires and mad scientists first met her girlfriend.

Read: One Hundred Wilderness Hexes (d4 Caltrops): Twenty each of forest/mountain/swamp/desert/ocean., with a tag line (“The stone bench”, “Avalanche!”, “Necropolis”, etc) and three tables to take it different directions. Some of them are locations, some are more like events or encounters, none of them are concerned with being level-appropriate, all the monsters have motivations.

Written: 910 kitten words, 3416/3000 for the week. Will I write anything over the weekend, or will I just die of stress at the approaching Corporate Superspreader Event?

Return of the training meeting. I wasn’t completely out to lunch, although apparently I sound terrible over the Internet. Also the Corporate Superspreader Event draws ever-nearer. Ugh.

Played: The tragic conclusion of Vivian’s 189X horror scenario. From best to worst outcome: Brand’s character survived with only mental scarring, Dave’s character lost a hand, Brooks’s character died, and my character was dragged screaming into the Black Forest. It was awesome! Vivian ad-libbed great spooky descriptions.

Read: The OP Lich Is A Returnee vol 5 (Stuart Grosse): 130% exposition by weight.

Written: FAIL. Still at 2506/3000 for the week.

Got up early for an all-hands meeting and found out it was cancelled when I tried to log in. :weary emoji: Also found out the dinners and other evening events next week are mandatory. :dead emoji:

Read: Ten Earth-Shattering Blows archives (Nuclearpasta): Like Mad Max but in a fantasy world with a cursed noblewoman and a whole lot of giant lizards. Like, so many giant lizards. Extremely violent, some nudity, not all of the lizards get a happy ending.

Read: Ozzie the Vampire archives (Eric Lide): She’s a vampire. She has a sapient spellbook. Together, they fight demons that are trying to conquer the world and try to graduate from art school. But not very diligently.

Read: The Last Stand of Mary Good Crow (Rachel Aaron): Fantasy Western, the new gold rush is crystal with amazing powers which can only be mined in one extrmely haunted place, humans are all still awful, 3/4 of the viewpoint characters are women who are not what they seem, so many people die. First of N.

Written: 977 kitten words, for a total of 2506/3000 for the week. Since I’m now into September with the kitten words, and only need 500 more for the week, maybe I should set those aside and work on something else. Maybe I should even reread last year’s NaNoWriMo project and see if I can pick up progress on it. Or I could die in a pit.

Customers, why you gotta have such complicated problems? Weather, why you gotta be so hot? Brain, why you gotta shrivel up like this?

Made Spotify play me a bunch of Ego Likeness. I think musically I’m a goth or something. Mostly something.

Read: Apparently I haven’t read anything in a week?! I mean, I’ve read some, but not finished anything that goes on the list. Or even made the list visible on the Web.

Written: 816 kitten words, 1529/3000 for the week. I mean, that’s not bad, at least from a numbers perspective.

It’s Monday, I guess. We have a new coworker, C, although boss A who does the most to train n00bs is out this week. Next week is the Corporate Superspreader Event, which I am not at all looking forward to. Humans and their virus-spewing faceholes, no thanks.

Read: FAIL.

Watched: FAIL.

Written: 716 kitten words, because I cannot write words that are in any way difficult. I can barely write these.

I was backup on call for the new person (who isn’t the newest any more, but she’s the newest who can be on call) all day, but fortunately nothing happened. Also I did a lot of nothing, although I did manage to go grocery shopping and also play too much Squaredle (and also Squardle and Waffle and OG Wordle, but those are much quicker) instead of getting a real lunch. Then we went over to Monkeycat Towers and ate delicious Thai food.

Played: Zoomwarts, end of session 2! The expedition into the land of the dead was successful, because I didn’t make Voldemort terrible enough, but I supposes it’s okay for the PCs to win sometimes. I have no idea how to top that, though!

Played: Among Us. I was definitely the worst imposter ever and deserved to be spaced.

Read: FAIL.

Written: +363 = 3576/3000 for the week.

Played: Vivian’s Victorian Germany Backwoods Horror thing. Brand joined, as the blacksmith who was first to find out the true horror of the mysterious growths. It turns out the villagers are only fine with them when they don’t know what’s in them, so probably we do have to help them deal with the ancient, lurking, ever-evolving vampire witch. This is bound to go well.

Read: Unicorns Aren’t Horny vol 2 (Semi Ikuta): I was hoping for more about the bicorn, but no, just a bunch of human angst and finally they get together and The End.

Written: FAIL.

Read: “The Sisters of Saint Nicola of The Almost Perpetual Motion vs the Lurch” (Garth Nix): Steampunk scientist-nuns and tree-animating druids defend England from tripedal biotech Martians. I believe this is a Rollicking Tale.

Read: The Lost Starship (Vaughn Heppner): Daring but not terribly well-written adventure against genetically-engineered assholes. Everything is always harder than it should be, no one cooperates, almost everyone is kind of a jerk,

Written: 935 kitten words. Total 2289/3000 for the week.

Read: The Empress of Salt and Fortune (Nghi Vo): A historian-cleric and their eidetic birb hear some of the history of their empire from a mysterious old lady. A novella, but you can tell that the actual events were every bit as twisty as Nirvana in Fire.

Read: That Time I Got Drunk And Yeeted A Love Potion At A Werewolf (Kimberly Lemming): Sequel to That Time I Got Drunk And Saved A Demon, about the previous main character’s bestie, also with a plot that is only a distraction from the steamy sex scenes. Points awarded for brutally murdering MRAs, I guess.

Written: 528 kitten words today, 1354/3000 for the week.

Still not a big fan of Mondays, but it wasn’t so bad. I had to speak to a customer (like, with my voice), but once I told them enough times to implement the changes my colleagues recommended on Saturday, their problems all magically disappeared! Maybe next time they’ll listen to Coworker K the first time instead of suffering for two days?

Still thinking about gaming, not very successfully. Remembered my idea for dungeon-crawling magical girls, but now that I think about it, magical girls might only work when their normal life is in the same setting as the audience (or in this case, the players). If both the normal and magical worlds are strange to the players, the contrast is lost.

Read: Hisses and Honey (Shannon Mayer): Conclusion of the trilogy about the poor baker who gets turned into a giant snake monster and her fight against the Greek pantheon. Most people get more or less what they want, there’s an obvious lead out to sequel series, don’t mess with the snake monster.

Written: 826 words, so the week isn’t off to a completely dismal start.

I didn’t spring out of bed and go right to Target to get a USB-USB cable (in fact, I never went to Target at all) but I did some writing and some eating and some walking, so I guess that was okay.

I also thought about gaming, because I still would like to run a real campaign, even if a group that could do such a thing would necessarily exclude me. I have setting ideas I could re-use, although they’re all terrible, and I have campaign plot ideas, although they’re also terrible and I couldn’t find the writeup of the conquest of Amber using the Fate system, Born to be Kings, to see if it’s as good as I remember. How does gaming even?

Played: Nothing, Jeremy and Rachel are on their yearly vacation to hide in a hotel in Las Vegas and order room service and do nothing whatsoever until they get thrown out.

Watched: Ms. Marvel ep 2, which was pretty intense. Kamala with a crush is the most ridiculous and also adorable thing, though.

Written: Did a 2-hour cowriting session, because I suddenly had nothing to occupy my day, and wrote 2423 words of an expected 1000. They’re all kitten words, so meh, but they are indisputably words. That left me at 5837/300 for the week, so after a celebratory ice cream (of DEATH) I wrote another 193 words, bringing me to 6030/3000.

I got up and went shopping even earlier, since I didn’t even have the excuse of needing to wait for the bookstore to open. I guess that was like being awake at a reasonable time? Anyway, I’ll claim I slept okay even though I felt lethargic later in the day.

Played: Zoomwarts, at long last. You’d think a game with only two players plus a GM who has no life would be easy to schedule, and yet… Bella and Rosamund and the lizards have found most of the students and conned a hapless psychopomp into helping them escape, but now two of the four are unconscious and a partially-overlapping two are trapped in a cave full of slugs and bubbles with an evil octopus who hates them.

Played: Among Us. I am still terrible at this game, and also after playing like ten rounds I have never been an imposter, but I will keep playing because it makes people happy.

Played: Uno Flip. What name should we give to the most greenish of the colors on the dark side of the cards? Ayse maintains it’s teal, but it doesn’t seem blue enough to be teal to me.

Read: The Maid I Hired Recently is Mysterious vol 3 (Wakame Konbu): Still has no socially redeeming value, but the bystander who ships the two leads has finally suggested a name to give to their feelings.

Written: 505 kitten words, resolving the Existential Dreads and bringing me to 3414/3000 for the week so far.

Back to the usual morning routine, whee. That’s a lot of email stacked up, but also a new coworker (the one I interviewed the other week, who received universally glowing reviews).

I rotated both my mattress and my computer desk around the Z axes, one because it probably needs to get crushed evenly and the other because it’s only been a million years since there was anyone who could look over my shoulder. We’ll see if either change makes any difference.

Etymology. With tentacles.

Read: This unexpected activity in my withered, black aortic arches… Is this what humans call feelings?

Written: 575 kitten words, and I think I’m giving my kitten the existential dreads! I know it has to be resolved, because other characters have had decades to deal with this, but I’m not sure how. Anyway, 2909/3000 for the week so far.

I finished grocery shopping before the time I even got out of bed yesterday, so I guess that’s something. Then I didn’t accomplish much the rest of the day, because I’m still useless. Also the pharmacy is persistently failing to restock on the gila monster venom I’m supposed to inject tomorrow.

Played: Nothing, Ken and Brand are both not up to gaming.

Read: Fangs and Fennel (Shannon Mayer): Second in the trilogy about a mild-mannered church-going baker who gets turned into a giant snake monster and has to try to keep what she can of her life while dealing with cheating husbands, hot vampires, racism, and divine intrigue.

Read: Magic Artisan Dahlia Wilts No More vol 1 (Megumi Sumikawa, Hisaya Amagishi, Kei): An engineer from modern Japan dies of overwork after being given a nontechnical job and is reborn as the daughter of a magic artificer in a fantasy world. Life ensues, including stupid men, patent disputes, and general sexism, but she gets through it.

Written: 613 words. I’m not sure I like any of them, but they were written, so 2334/3000 for the week.

Okay, this is not right. I should sleep better in my own bed than when travelling, and yet. Maybe I need a softer mattress? Maybe I need better/different food? Maybe I need to not drink caffeine at lunch? Better fan placement?

Despite sleeping in until forever, I did get laundry and some chores done, and Thai takeaway for dinner, but that was about it.

Read: Aerial Magic season 1 (walkingnorth): Lovely watercolor slice-of-life comic about witches in a broom repair shop, with soundtrack. All feelings and soft colors.

Written: 924 words, bringing me to 1721/3000 for the week, which is on track for Wednesday.

I did not sleep as well this time, for no obvious reason. Too many people? Didn’t hydrate sufficiently yesterday? Minor sunburn through the remnants of my hair where the sunscreen didn’t take as well? Stars are wrong? But it’s going-home day, so whatever.

There was almost a board game, but Dave badgered me into eating a brunch instead, and then he helped Sherilyn reinstall her dishwasher, so everyone was occupied until Josh emerged to be sung at and becaked. He is now old enough that it means something when he refuses to buy beer for people! Not that any of his younger relations seem interested yet.

On the way home, I was too sleepy to entertain the driver, but despite this shameful dereliction of duty, we made it home in good time.

Then I was completely useless for the rest of the day.

Read: Cage of Souls (Adrian Tchaikovsky): A person from the last city in the world is sentenced to a fairly brutal prison where strange things happen, and reveals his backstory and world through flashbacks. It’s more similar to Gene Wolfe’s “Severian” books than to Vance’s “Dying Earth”, although not quite like either. It’s also surprisingly hopeful for Earth if not for humanity, given how much of a wreck the planet is.

Written: 797 words, which is not enough to make up for yesterday by itself, but is a good start.

I woke up on the first try again, and this time I got up right away! What is going on?!

Today I tried to learn One Deck Dungeon along with Ken and Jus but failed on the first set of doors, ate a bunch more food that was really tasty even if not metabolically appropriate, went swimming in a chilly pool with many splooshy children, played Among Us for the first time and did absolutely terribly at it, stood at the back deck admiring the night sky and its relative lack of fireworks, and stayed up until midnight playing Dominion.

I had nothing to do with it, but the jigsaw puzzle that was started before the pandemic has finally been finished.

Written: VACATION.

There was an available mattress, which might be why I slept much better than usual for a vacation. Or maybe it’s the new brain pills, or having something other than capitalism to get up for. Anyway, I was surprisingly functional.

Important vacation activities today: Playing Tomb of Annihilation (same engine as Castle Raveloft/Temple of Elemental Evil) with Ken and Jus, watching kids swim, eating grilled foods, playing Super Smash Bros with everybody, playing Lords of Waterdeep until midnight. I did so badly at Waterdeep that even Jus, playing for the first time after an exciting day of vacationing, beat me. This is because I am dumb, but I like playing Waterdeep anyway.

After smashing a bro, Nonny went to play Splatoon with Josh and Ollie and some online friend of theirs, and apparently stomped all over the three adult videogamers. To the point where the one who wasn’t local got on voice chat with him and wanted to know if he’s really nine. I tend to think poorly of Nonny a lot of the time because I mostly see him when he’s wound up and sleep-deprived and nine, but he really is great at video games.

Written: VACATION.

Everyone is covid-free, so we went to Roseville (no longer held in Rosevilla, CA)! As usual, I rode up with Ken, and we talked about gaming, listened to folk-punk music and Old Gods of Appalachia, stopped for horrifyingly greasy Mexican food, and didn’t die from traffic. We got there before the other car by like one minute, because they didn’t stop for anything.

The Petterson family has very exciting news, which you are probably not cleared for or I would have already told you. But it is all good news!

Heard much about Al’s Ptolus campaign, which is about to hit episode 100 and sounds like it has been a blast the whole way. I wish I could run something like that, but I don’t know how to do it without putting in all that work, and I’m not sure I could put that much work in even if I wanted to. Also I would probably need more reliable and interested gamers.

Dave and I finally bailed from the dying Empires & Puzzles alliance and went to Marith’s much more active alliance.

Played: Codenames.

Read: The Holy Grail of Eris vol 1 (Hinase Momoyama, Kujira Tokiwa, Yu-nagi): She’s a sincere but wallflowery noble girl, she’s the ghost(?) of someone executed for getting dumped by the prince. Together, they fight aristocratic intrigue.

Written: VACATION.

Waffled between getting up like a sensible person and sleeping in forever like a person on vacation, ended up kind of flopping around until it was time to go see the local production of that classic play, Buns In Verona. The best part was when Paris did the happy dance after being told he would get to marry Juliet, although the opening narration was well-delivered and Lord Montague was very impressive.

Tested negative for the rona, so if there is an expedition to Roseville tomorrow, perhaps I will get to go along.

Watched: Arcane 1-3: Interesting animation style, full of doom, reasonably coherent for something based on a video game, makes me think of Blades in the Dark.

Written: 452 kitten words, bringing me to 3438/3000 for the week. If we succeed in going to Roseville and I fail to write, I’m not doomed until next week!

Offloaded all my cases to coworker L who just came back from leave, did some stuff on the project with the exciting new deadline, and now it’s vacation time!

Played: Eclipse Phase 2. After derailing (SWIDT?) the plot to explode the 24:12 express to Olympus Mons, the intrepid Firewall agents meet up with the charismatic Barsoomian leader who is certain she can control TITAN nanotech well enough to make the Planetary Consortium knuckle under. Chi knows perfectly well that their sister is a narcissistic megalomaniac who definitely underestimates the rest of the solar system, and tries to talk her down from this without mentioning Firewall. Project Ozma is not shown, but is described, as something Nadine obviously has to go deal with before she can liberate Mars. Next week, we’ll find out whether this works at all.

Read: That Time I Got Drunk And Saved A Demon (Kimberly Lemming): What it says on the tin. Farmer girl rescues a demon, discovers that literally everything she thought about demons and gods is wrong, grows increasingly attached to demon, has wild sex with demon, marries demon. There’s a plot where other characters are also surprisingly quick to completely reverse their worldview and help the hot demon boys, but the spicy romance is definitely the point of the book.

Written: 331 words today, 2986/3000 this week.

Failed to put my sleep mask on, so had dreams about light stabbing into my eyes even though one of them was squinched closed and I had to keep forcing it open to see the bus stop. Brains, I’m telling you.

Read: Creepy Cat vol 3 (Cotton Valent): There’s some plot in this one, but I think it distracts from the weirdness.

Written: 665 words, across the street from the beast. (Total 2655/3000 for the week.)

I was pretty much useless today, but I did find some peach diet Snapple to alternate with the raspberry that I thought was the only flavor sold any more.

Played: Lancer, at long last! Allegedly this mission is to contain a potential grey goo outbreak, but I think something much more Horusy is going on. Also we got it all over us, so I’m sure that will come up later. We made it through two fights in one session, too.

Read: Yakuza Reincarnation vol 2 (Hiroki Miyashita, Takeshi Natsuhara): The honorable old-school yakuza reincarnated as a fantasy princess continues cleansing the kingdom of drug dealers, pimps, demons, and other sleazy criminals.

Written: 510 words, bringing me to a total of 3237/3000 for the week. I did make my goal, but it’s a bit lame compared to previous weeks.

Why is it so hot? Is “June” any kind of excuse?

Marith is dead from always being stressed by work and never sleeping, so no Zoomwarts, but I went over for dinner and playing with Nonny, and there was some impromptu roleplaying about a tea shop in Texas, with murder and zombies. Maybe I should make Jus go to Big Bad Con and GM in my place.

Trying to switch to Firefox, but I have so much stuff already in Chrome…

Read: Beware of Chicken (Casualfarmer): A random Canadian guy is isekai’d into the body of the lowest-ranked guy in a sect of cultivators and goes off to start a farm far away from martial arts bullshit. This works about as well as you might expect.

Read: Starfish (Lisa Fipps): Novel in blank verse about a tween being bullied because she is not thin enough for people and developing better coping strategies with the aid of therapy.

Read: Komi Can’t Communicate vol 19 (Tomohito Oda): Oops, looks like that side of the love triangle has been resolved.

Read: Hitomi-chan is Shy With Strangers vol 4 (Chorisuke Natsumi): I like this better than Furi-san, maybe because Hitomi seems more legitimately scary, but it’s still wearing a bit thin.

Written: 105 words. Brain, why?