I have nothing to say about Cliche Day, my writing says it all for me.
Watched: My Happy Marriage 1-5: It’s like Meiji Cinderella, but then suddenly it’s a different genre and the ML isn’t awful and the FL is healing from abuse. If only the patriarchy would leave her alone!
Written: FAIL.
Within a reasonable confidence interval.
Brain? Brain? What is “brain”? If I had anything like that, I would not have had the cleaners come at the same time I was having a meeting.
Marith and I wanted to watch the new season of Our Flag Means Death, but it’s on some streaming service somewhere, not the streaming services on my TV. Fuck capitalism.
Watched: One Piece 1.1-2: I’d say it must get better later, or else there wouldn’t be 1087 episodes, but the first two were not good enough to make us want to watch any more. Maybe it’s just the bias of seeing it first, but I liked the opening of the live-action series way more.
Written: FAIL. Maybe I need to go back to 100 words per day.
But I have no dog, so the big event today was first signups for Big Bad Con. As usual, at 12:00:01 everybody clicked to sign up for their favorite game and the website caught on fire. After a couple of hours of watching the BBC team do the sorts of things I tell people to do in my day job, the website was functional enough that I could get my two signups through. Now I am scheduled for Invisible Sun and The Gnoles’ House and can stop worrying about it until Monday week.
Watched: Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid 1.8-9: A new dragon. Also too much of the old dragons, or at least the shota-con one. This is not a very good show, but it beat staring blankly into space while I ate dinner.
Written: 215.
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.
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.
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!
No gaming, I blame capitalism. Instead, Marith came over and we watched more Mob Psycho 100. Also I played too much Minecraft, and got ganked by a wet zmobie when I stopped to mine clay on my way to the village where I might be able to turn my string into emeralds. I managed to refloor my hall of making, though, even the edges under the furniture.
Watched: Mob Psycho 100 3.6-8: End of the giant broccoli (and Dimple?), then aliens. That was actually super-nice of the Telepathy Club.
Read: My Cute Little Kitten vol 1 (Milk Morinaga): Roommates adopt an orphan kitten in a no-pets apartment, then one confesses to the other, but the kitten has excellent (terrible) timing for cat stuff. Life ensues, in slices.
Written: 167 today, 573 for the week, 573 overall.
There’s no going to Roseville because there is only sickness, but It’s not like I gave up having today off. Mostly I slept stupidly, though.In the evening, Marith came over for anime and pizza, but the pizza was bad. The anime was good, though.
Watched: Mob Psycho 100 3.3-5: You know it’s bad when calling yourselves the Giant Broccoli Cult would be a step up.
Read: Bones of the Past (Drew Hayes): Further supervillainous adventures of Hephaestus and friends. Includes superheroes being butts, supervillains being terrifying, and an extremely ambitious plot for vengeance. Also, the secret origin of Fornax!
Written: 154 words
It’s the walk-a-thon at Nonny’s school, so I went to enjoy the breeze and hang out with people and eat a decent veggie burger and walk around a track. Then, since I was already way down that way and crossing the expressway to take the bus toward home would be a pain, I went to the Trader Joe’s that is dangerously near the Barnes and Noble and had a bookstore accident. It’s only once a year!
When I got home, I worked more on my grand orange terracotta hall, and also went looking for iron so I could make a pickaxe to mine out the gold ore cluttering up my side hall. It turned out the iron I thought I saw before was actually more gold, but eventually I found a cave that went down and down to where it had a little iron. It also had lapis and gold, so I need to go back at some point.
Watched: Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress 10-12 and movie 1: Finished the series, which ended about as well as could be reasonably expected, and then let autoplay roll over into the compilation movie to remind myself of the early stuff. It was about 30% shorter than a rewatch of the episodes.
Written: FAIL.
Of course, not going into the office at all is the best, even when there’s a meeting first thing.
Watched: RWBY 9.2-4: Yep, very Wonderland. The cat is kind of alarming.
I stayed up past midnight playing Minecraft, which caused my eyes to turn into little spirals. I got two side halls in my grand orange terracotta hall dug, and most of a third (except for the random lump of gold ore that I can’t mine because I have no iron), explored some caves of dripstone and death, respawned on the steep slope of plummeting and zmobies several times, maybe saw some iron ore before getting exploded by a creeper, and finally hunted a third sheep so I could make a bed to respawn at home. When I put it that way, it was a lot of Minecraft!
Written: No writing, only video games.
Yay, no commuting! Lots of customers, but whatever. I did at least as much work as I would have in the office, so bite me, capitalists.
Also I can have cleaners in when I’m not at the office, so my apartment is slightly less squalid.
Watched: My Hero Academia 6.24-25: Uraraka finally got to do something, even if it was only make a speech, and now the team is back together. Apparently the next season will consist of a single scene that takes 25 episodes.
Watched: RWBY 9.1: Well, that’s better than what it looked like was going to happen at the end of season 8. Maybe. Also, brightly colored!
Read: Zero Hour (Craig Alanson): Even more shenanigans, but Skippy’s quest has advanced by one milestone. Also everybody is even more doomed than they were before they tried to fix things.
Read: Trouble on Paradise (Craig Alanson): Side characters from book three get into extra trouble, but the explosions don’t damage human-alien relations. Much.
Written: FAIL.
No office today, so I was able to handle my part of the zillion customer cases that came in without unnecessary discomfort and humanity. Spent a while setting up an important tool because the automatic copy from the old laptop didn’t happen, but I think overall it was better to set up the current version fresh.
Watched: My Hero Academia 6.21-23: Well, that villain didn’t last very long. Deku is becoming totally OP by the expected method of abandoning all self-care, but All Might is still not to be fucked with. Two episodes left in the season!
Read: “Salt Water” (Eugenia Triantafyllou): Kind of like “Ponies” but mermaids and fish and not darkest horror.
Read “Fitting In” (Max Gladstone): “Wild Cards” universe, a former reality-TV superhero and other Jokers protect a local institution from goons.
Written: FAIL.
At least I didn’t have to commute today, but where did my month go? Where did my quarter go? What is wrong with my life? Why do I only have one sister to come watch anime with me?
Watched: My Hero Academia 6.18-20: One of the downsides of making heroes an idealized class, or alternately, of entrusting society to “them” instead of “us”.
Read: You Sexy Thing (Cat Rambo): Soldiers who retired to run a restaurant get pulled into interstellar intrigue and piracy, with a living ship. For no apparent reason, there’s magic as well as high tech. Not like there needs to be a reason, I guess.
Written: FAIL.
Was I smart today? Only vaguely, I think. Mostly I read Nebula nominees, and probably didn’t appreciate them enough.
Watched: My Hero Academia 6.16-17: Backstory for Hawks, additional backstory for the Todorokis. I understand that regulating parenthood would be nothing but wall-to-wall abuse, but some people really should not be allowed to reproduce.
Read: Wild Massive (Scotto Moore): Artificial multiverse, colonization/assimilation, genocide, theme parks, revenge, sufficiently-advanced sorcery, unethical experimentation, higher powers, sufficiently-advanced technology, mayhem, shenanigans, narrative warfare, and no romance. It was a pretty wild ride.
Read: “If You Find Yourself Speaking to God, Address God with the Informal You” (John Chu): An actor meets basically-Superman in his secret ID at the gym. Slice of life.
Read: “Two Hands, Wrapped in Gold” (SB Divya): I figured out which fairytale this was as soon as we saw the MC’s full name, but I don’t think it was supposed to be a puzzle, just less Eurocentric.
Read: “The Prince of Salt and the Ocean’s Bargain” (Natalia Theodoridou): Original fairytale with a modern sensibility.
Read: “Rabbit Test” (Samantha Mills): I really hope Christian fuckfaces aren’t still going to be denying women reproductive freedom in a hundred years…
Read: “Your Eyes, My Beacon: Being an Account of Several Misadventures and How I Found My Way Home” (CL Clark): Kind of Beauty and the Beast, but sapphic and there’s a lighthouse and it’s different.
Read: “The Calcified Heart of Saint Ignace Battiste” (Christopher Caldwell): Young priest spies on a spooky ritual in Spookytown and learns that the orthodoxy is a lie.
Read: “The Goldfish Man” (Maureen McHugh): Homeless lady has a hard life for a while and then meets a strange person on the streets.
Read: “Ribbons” (Natalia Theodoridou): Another modernish fairytale, in a world where fairytale things happen. Not sure what the ribbon is a metaphor for — there’s already plenty of queerness.
Read: “This Village” (Eugenia Triantafyllou): Welcome to Wicked Witch Town.
Read: “The Coward Who Stole God’s Name” (John Wiswell): The most beloved man in the world reveals his true self to a reporter. Chaos almost doesn’t ensue. Read to me like a direct commentary on celebrity/billionaire adulation.
Written: FAIL.
Somehow made it to Friday, but I must be doing something wrong. I’m pretty sure a very mild workweek like mine should not lead to such bleargh. I barely had enough energy to eat Chinese food and watch anime with Marith.
Watched: My Hero Academia 6.13-15: Well, that was inconclusive, except for all the people who died. Setbacks are par for the course in shonen, though.
Written: 148.
It may have been a three-day work-week for me, but somehow being sick is not like an actual long weekend, so I am perfectly happy with it being Friday.
Watched: My Hero Academia 6.10-12: Dabi’s big reveal! Immediately undercut, but still, fuck that guy.
Read: Katalepsis ch 19.1-14 (Hungry): Oh no, I’m caught up!
Read: Past the Redline (RavensDagger): A spaceship racer from Earth is flung across the galaxy by a mysterious technobabble accident and runs roughshod over all the aliens there by virtue of advanced technology and a massive suit of plot armor. Many poorly-justified murders ensue.
Written: FAIL with FAIL sauce and a light dusting of FAIL.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Just because we could, we gathered at Ayse and Ken’s place to eat delicious lamb date stuff and cake and tell Ayse happy birthday some more. Also we watched the antepenultimate episode of Sailor Moon Stars and clobbered people with rubber balls.
Watched: Sailor Moon Stars 198: Everybody’s dead, next two episodes will just be drifting petals and sad music.
Written: Nothing, although I made a few notes for the con.
Happy happy Marith Day!
We celebrated by going over to Monkeycat Towers to eat Thai food and watch the first three episodes of Revue Starlight. The Thai food was delicious, the anime was not what we expected. Things it reminded us of include: Revolutionary Girl Utena, Kaleido Star, Princess Tutu, Star Driver, AKB0048, and Strawberry Panic. It is of the inherently cursed yuri-for-boys genre, and also seems to rely on knowing the characters from other parts of the sprawling multimedia franchise, so we probably don’t need to watch any more.
Read: Crusade (Glynn Stewart): Completes the trilogy with Exile and Refuge. The humans and their friends defeat the great enemy with the power of archaeology, while also dealing with first contact with assholes.
Written: 348 kitten words.
Why is there so much temperature? I didn’t order this! At least the customers were mostly quiet.
Played: Zoomwarts. The lizards and their mammalian sidekicks made it back into the land of the dead, to rescue everyone!
Eaten: Coq au vin and kale salad.
Watched: The Slayers 4-5: Attack of the fish-creature! Also joke which caused Jus to die of mortification, which fortunately will never be brought up again.
Written: 286 kitten words, for a total of 4119/3000 so far this week.
In the morning I went to watch Nonny run approximately a million laps for fundraising at his school, as Jus did in years before. It was a pretty nice day for being outside, aside from minor tree orgies. I didn’t manage to eat breakfast or lunch, but I did manage to go grocery shopping, so whatever.
Watched: Slayers 1-3. Jus and Nonny are old enough to appreciate it now, possibly because everybody loves explosions and antiheroes.
Eaten: Dandan noodles and velvet chicken with snap peas in lemon ginger sauce.
Played: No Zoomwarts, Marith is too flat.
Words: FAIL
Cleaners came at 7:00 this morning, so I had to get up, but then I took a nap thing, or maybe was just a huge useless lump for a while. I managed to shop for a grocery and then visit friends to get hugs, though.
Played: Zoomwarts. Bella isn’t dead, nobody is a vampire (although Emily is also not alive), the ministry is taking credit for saving the day, the surviving eight and a half students are going on winter break early, everyone else has been sucked into a pit to the underworld. Maybe we’ll stop here and let Ken run D&D so Nonny can fight monsters, or maybe Bella and Rosamund and the lizards will have to go get everyone’s soul back.
Eaten: Tasty kebabs, tasty feta-cucumber salad, tasty chocolate splenda cream pie. But we do also love Ken for himself! Really!
Watched: Love, Chunibyo & Other Delusions 1.9: No parasol will protect Rikka from Nibutani talking about feelings!
Watched: Azumanga Daioh 1: Still ridiculous! Also, the fluffy temptation of wheat.
Watched: RWBY 1.4: Sproing!
Played: Zombie ball tag. If a zombie catches a human, they turn into a zombie, but if a zombie gets hit by the ball three times, they turn into a human. Seemed to be reasonably well-balanced in that sometimes the humans won and sometimes the zombies. Also not nearly as contentious as Sneaky Statues.
Words: 554 kitten words about nothing in particular.
I didn’t really get up earlier than usual for grocery shopping, but I did it with less whining, so that’s good, right?
On-call in the afternoon, but the customers were blessedly quiet.
Read: Rackham Vale (Brian Saliba, Craig Schaffer): An OSR sandbox based on (and including many examples of) the art of Arthur Rackham, featuring many faeries of various scales, mutant alligators, curses, ambitious witches, and party trees, among other fey goings-on.
Played: Zoomwarts. Surprisingly, trying the same plan again worked better. Everybody got killed, but some of them got over it, so that’s good, right? Possibly we’re going to start alternating Zoomwarts with D&D run by Ken, so that Nonny can fight monsters.
Watched: Love, Chunibyo & Other Delusions 1.7-8: Beach episode! But more importantly, we find out what Rikka’s deal is. Also, both positive and negative examples of romantic behavior which may be of use to Jus now that she is a middle-schooler and practically a teenager.
Eaten: Ribs! (Also brisket, burnt ends, collard greens, etc.) Apparently Jus took a break from wanting sushi 24/7 to demand ribs, and nobody was going to object.
Played: Laser tag.
Watched: RWBY 1.1 for Jus. She liked it, and we aren’t even to the trauma part yet!
Words: FAIL. I did a little revising because I figured out what one of the slang terms should be, but not very much.
Although I was on call today, I managed to have a fun day anyway by staying within 15min of my computer and only getting texted once. Whee!
Played: Minigolf and air hockey. I am terrible at minigolf, but we weren’t keeping score, so nobody knows exactly how terrible, and that’s like winning, right? Also I got to display my maturity by not asking if it was my turn to putt every time someone else went.
Played: Catch. It’s a classic for a reason!
Eaten: Muslim Chinese food. It was really good
Watched: Love, Chunibyo & Other Delusions 1.6:
Played: Super Smash Bros. I am also terrible at this game. I just try to face somebody who’s not on my team and mash the basic attack button until I get kicked off the edge three times. But I’m willing to be useless if it makes Nonny happy.
Read: FAIL
Words: FAIL
Surprisingly, I’m not on call for any part of today! Not that it had any impact on my complete uselessness.
Played: Zoomwarts. Bella, Rosamund (now conscious), and the lizards are making progress, but nothing is ever easy. Now they’re all in the vampire room (aka morning solarium), although only Baby Lizard and Bella are actually chained to the wall.
Eaten: Instant coq au vin, romanesco (not tesco fresco), goat brie, etc.
Watched: Love, Chunibyo & Other Delusions 1.3: Rikka has a minion!
Played: Murder Mystery until Nonny got frustrated, then Sneaky Statues.
Words: FAIL.
Today was going to be Kitten Café, but Jus banged up her foot, so instead it will be tomorrow, and today will be lying in bed forever until I DIE. But I will be a warm and cozy corpse.
Read: Burning Bright (Melissa McShane): In an alternate England, a young lady’s father tells her she can either marry the title he picks out for her or spend her life locked in the attic, so she takes her strongest-ever fire powers and joins the Navy. Despite it being the Napoleonic wars, she gets sent to the Caribbean to incinerate pirates. Adventure and (sadly het) romance ensue.
Read: Failed Princesses vol 2 (Ajiichi): The leads are already sacrificing social standing for each other, but additional potential love interests are appearing! Oh no!
Watched: Sorcery in the Big City: A ridiculous OAV about a sorceress bringing things to life at Christmas in NYC, a teddy bear becoming a superhero, a sympathetic NYPD officer, ancient evils awakening, and other such nonsense.
Words: 571 words about kittens, although they seem a little substandard. 227 words of revision, but I think they’re all pretty much wrong and need to be thrown away.