Tag: anime

I had the ice cream for lunch dessert, but it was Humphrey Slocombe “Secret Breakfast”, so I’m saying it counts.

Apparently my new Saturday routine is to go to Togo’s and eat a pastrami sandwich and drink multiple flavors of Diet Dr Pepper from the drink robot, on the way to the book store and grocery store. The ice cream store doesn’t open until noon, and I usually try to get my act together before then, so it will have to be intermittent.

Watched: Puella Magi Madoka Magica 10-12: The end! Jus was appropriately emotional at finding out Homura and Madoka’s deal. Not sure what to show her next, maybe Revolutionary Girl Utena.

Written: 122 of outlining. I don’t know what these aliens should look like. I wrote some stuff down, but it’s probably not right.

But does “chocolate cake” mean chocolate crumb and any kind of frosting, any kind of crumb and chocolate frosting, or chocolate crumb and chocolate frosting?

Today I ate a pastrami cheesesteak, which was okay, did some grocery shopping, and was a massive lump because I felt lethargic and headachey and bleah. My guess it was side effects from the vaccination yesterday. Still better than anything I’ve ever heard about shingles.

Watched: Puella Magi Madoka Magica 7-9: Oh good, Jus was appropriately disturbed to find out how the magical ecosystem works and what Kyubey’s role is.

Written: 147.

Penguins! They exist! Had you heard?

Today I accomplished all the things I planned to do, surprisingly. I did get up too early to get phlebotomized, then made it to the bookstore, a sandwich shop, and the grocery before arriving back home in plenty of time to be on call all afternoon. I was even able to almost entirely ignore customers and travel to Monkeycat Towers to watch more Madoka Magica. So yay me, I guess.

Watched: Puella Magi Madoka Magica 4-6: We finally got to the episode where Kyubey explains what’s really involved in becoming a magical girl. “Why does everybody react the same way when they find out? I don’t understand humans.”

Read: D&D5e Tome of Beasts 3 (Scott Gable, Richard Green, Kelly Pawlik, Sebastian Rombach, Mike Welham, et al): A pretty good monster book, although like all modern D&Ds it takes a Linnaean approach to monsters.

Written: 175.

Today was a day of uselessness I mean relaxation.

In the evening, we had anime again, so I at least had to leave the apartment, even if it wasn’t exactly useful.

Watched: Puella Magi Madoka Magica 1-3: Jus is now old enough to see this! We got to the all-important third episode, so she wants to keep watching.

Written: 254.

Finally, something I can participate in!

I slacked in sick to work, because I did not sleep at all last week, and slept all morning instead. By afternoon I was able to go get my glasses fixed and scarf some fries and soup, and now I am pretty much back to normal except for my face being even uglier than usual.

Read: Hitomi-chan is Shy With Strangers vol 7 (Chorisuke Natsumi): Only seven volumes and copious help from shippers before a love confession!

Watched: Wednesday 7-8: Yeah, yeah, Uncle Fester, power of friendship, mysteries, plot twists, all fine, but a of all, it’s 2023, Wednesday and Enid can totally smooch, and second of b, the final boss was boring. The secondary villains were fine, it should have been just them. It seems extremely likely I will watch the second season when it comes out anyway.

Watched: The Seven Deadly Sins 1.1-3: Maybe the plot is great or something, but the “hero” is always perving on a young woman who is completely dependent on him, and it’s just not funny.

Written: FAIL.

Didn’t manage to go into the office, but otherwise not too dreadful, the customers have been fairly quiescent. However, I apparently forgot how to operate my body, and there was vasovagal syncope and blood everywhere and my glasses got bent, and nothing was any good. Not what I hoped for from an evening!

Read: Evil Empire (Joel Shepherd): Sequel to Angelina. After the exciting events at the end of the last book, all the protagonists have a powerup, but so do their enemies, and now they’re finding out why. It’s not good. However, the looming threat seems more pulled out of someone’s hat than grounded like the first book.

Read: Slugblaster (Mikey Hamm): I’ve read most of this, I’ve played it a few times, but now I have actually read it all the way through.It’s still great, there are zillions of random tables for everything, maybe I should try running it at Big Bad Con next year. Except I’m too old and not cool enough.

Read: Ogami-San Can’t Keep It In vol 2 (Yu Yoshidamaru): Now that the gimmick has been established, it doesn’t have to come up as much. Ogami being a horndog and Yaginuma being whatever he is and their friends shipping them is enough for most of the drama. You can get it, Ogami!

Watched: Komi Can’t Communicate 1: The anime is much like manga panels put on the screen, and I’ve already got 394569 volumes of the manga.

Watched: Wednesday 3-6: The plot thickens! Wednesday’s doom increases, as does her parents’ and her friends’ and really that of everybody she comes in contact with, and the other characters are actually not shy about calling her out on it, which is nice.

Written: Only FAIL.

 

Darn, I’ve run out of chocolate-covered chocolate.

Somehow I got up and did things today. Not sure how that happened, but here we are, with fresh produce and bao and flu antigens and the return of anime night and everything.

Watched: Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts 2.3-4: Looking for Kipo’s backstory, but getting Wolf’s along the way.

Watched: Sacrificial Princess & The King of Beasts 1-4: Our first show for revived anime night! It’s pretty fluffy, with hardly any humans being devoured on screen, and so far the princess is only being compassionate, not getting into administration like rumor has it she will. It’s a full season, though, so we have plenty of time yet. Probably not enough for the cat princess to redeem herself, though.

Read: My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom vol 8 (Satoru Yamaguchi, Nami Hidaka): More of the same, including a flashback to Katarina’s earlier teen years when other girls were just as unable to deal with her. Apparently next volume they graduate and get jobs, but I can’t imagine it will change Katarina at all.

Written: FAIL.

Nightvale counts, even though he is partly stars!

Getting two cats got me two weeks of Fact Or Share, but this time I had to use a fact, which is that deepsea anglerfish are not the size of a Nerf football, they are big enough to swallow you whole.

Watched: My Happy Marriage 10-12: We find out what’s up with the secret family and why whatsisface is being so creepy and how you should definitely not underestimate Miyo. Happy ending!

Read: System Collapse (Martha Wells): Oh man, poor Murderbot! I’m glad it has a terrifying friend to watch media with, and also that it is developing non-murdery skills for saving the day. Plus, “capitalism sucks” never grows old as a theme.

Written: FAIL.

My theory: Everything wrong with the US today is a result of insufficient Sesame Street.

Watched: My Happy Marriage 6-9: It was nice to see the random rich guys who thought they were so great pick a fight with an actual military monster hunter, but Cinderella still needs to communicate better!

Read: She Loves To Cook, and She Loves To Eat vol 2 (Sakaomi Yuzaki): It’s kind of adorable how Nomoto (the one who likes to cook) is just “Welp, guess I’m a lesbian, I should check the Internet to find out how that works” and now she has a pocket friend to discuss things with. Plus, new character with a completely different relationship to food than the main couple.

Written: 184, although it took me like two weeks to accumulate what should be half a night’s work. Neither kitties nor germs are conducive to writing. (Also I suck.)

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.