Tag: birthday

D’oh, I completely forgot!

Randomly took the day off work, since I was owed a day from working on President Day. Meant to get up and listen in on Friday morning training anyway, but completely failed and ended up sleeping in until I felt bad about not feeding the cats. Then I was moving so I fed myself with Pakistani-Indian Fusion Cuisine, spicy chicken qorma and less-spicy samosas and butter garlic sesame-seed naan. It might have been sufficiently celebratory.

I could possibly have done something useful, but mostly I cleaned up browser tabs, quite a few of which were short stories I had been meaning to read. Watched some TV with Marith, who is sick as well as having no computer. Probably I didn’t catch her cold. I hope my computer didn’t catch anything either.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage 4.7: The one with shady funeral home family, where Parker has an honest-to-something feeling.

Read (manga): In/Spectre vol 19 (Kyo Shirodaira, Chashiba Katase): A bunch of one-chapter stories. Kuro tried to star in one, Rikka played a horrible prank, assorted yōkai caused trouble.

Read (short): “Victory Citrus is Sweet” (Thoraiya Dyer): A spacer who is actually kind of a jerk gets himself and his apprentice in trouble by cutting corners to show somebody up.

Read (short): “Welcome to the Medical Clinic at the Interplanetary Relay Station | Hours Since the Last Patient Death: 0” (Caroline M Yoachim): A future in which the current American medical system is still in place. Story in the form of a choose-your-own-adventure.

Read (short): “When the Yogurt Took Over: A Short Story” (John Scalzi): Definitely a different spin on the “enough computers together form a mind” trope.

Read (short): “Transcript of Interaction Between Astronaut Mike Scudderman and the OnStar Hands-Free A.I. Crash Advisor” (Grady Hendrix): Did you want your AI to be useful? Sorry, your timeline stems from the Trump-Musk presidency, you only get a chatbot.

Read (short): “Wikihistory” (Desmond Warzel): Everybody who gets access to time travel does it, then some long-suffering admin has to revert their changes.

Read (short): “In the Forests of Memory” (E Lily Yu): A sad story about an old lady in a cemetery of holographic grave markers, living off the offerings.

Read (short): “Presence” (Ken Liu): A sad story about an emigrant visiting his dying mother in the old country via telepresence.

Read (short): “The Thief of Memory” (Sunyi Dean): What is identity but memory? Also not a happy story, although you can’t blame a desparate teenager for making a rookie mistake.

Read (short): “The Dark House” (AC Wise): A haunted house, a haunted photographer, haunted photographs.

Written (game design): 136.

Also National Badger Day. Not sure whether that includes honey badgers, but they don’t care.

Marith wanted to bowl, so I rushed to the gooshyfood store and back to make sure I would not repurposed as cat food later in the week, and made it back in plenty of time to win at bowling (I was the only one to break 100) and steal Nonny’s fries. Then we went back to Monkeycat Towers to eat Thai food (mostly pad thai, since after all it is National Noodle Day) and watch Everything Everywhere All At Once, which is pretty much Marith’s favorite movie ever and one she hopes everybody will appreciate as much as her. I’m not sure that’s humanly possible, but it was well-received and gave Jus many feels. After the movie, we played the old party game of Sardines, but it was too spooky with the lights out and too easy with the lights on so eventually we stopped. I never found anybody, because Sardines is not as easy as bowling.

Written: 202.

Soon she’ll be driving, but I can still remember when she couldn’t even walk!

We took her to sushi, then went to her place to meet one of her wives (apparently she has two, along with a mistress and maybe some concubines, because she is secretly the Empress of China) and feed her cake and watch her open presents. Marith and I were privileged to view Nonny’s collection of mysterious Roblox auras. A good time was had by all, especially the new Ms 15!

Read: The Invisible Man & His Soon-to-Be Wife vol 4 (Iwatobineko): Kissing?! KISSING?! After only four volumes?!

Written: 119.

Instead of going to a waterpark, though, I went to a birthday party. HAPPY HAPPY RACHEL-DAY (observed)!! There were some people I hadn’t seen for a week, some people I hadn’t seen for a year, and then some people on top of that. Also foods and conversation. I was definitely the lamest person at the party.

Written: 153, all terrible.

Now Sage is also one year old! She is extremely bb for such a grownup cat.

Went back to the office, ate eggplant stir-fry, did a work. First day this year I have not felt the need for a jacket.

Read: Sheeply Horned Witch Romi vol 2 (Yoichi Abe): The world is completely different again, fragments of the boy’s personality are looking for fragments of the witch’s personality to reassemble, but this may not be as straight-forward as hoped, and the results might not be entirely positive.

Read: Wartorn Stars (Glynn Stewart): Having reached the stars of the aliens who need help, the humans save as many days as they can, which is not all of them, but enough to get acclaim from the aliens and their allies, and also find out a lot of confusing things about the enemy.

Read: Dai Dark vol 2 (Q Hayashida): Finally the main character and his skeletal buddy have their own creepy spaceship so they can fly around looking for trouble meatball spaghetti and bones.

Written: 176.

Nightvale is one (1) years old today! That makes him a grown-up cat, not a kitten! He might still be kind of bb, though.

As usual after going into the office two days in a row, I am pretty blah, but I did a work and snuggled one or more cats.

Played: Ayse wants to play Minecraft together, so we spent some time tootling around the proposed seed in creative mode until everybody decided they like it. Someday, when we are not all busy with Easter, we will reboot it in survival mode and punch trees together.

Read: Edges (Linda Nagata): Start of a follow-on series to Deception Well and Vast and all those. One of the explorers returns home in a stolen ship, recruiting for an expedition back to the origins of humanity, where the people Deception Well left behind made Dyson spheres and then unmade them and now nobody knows what’s there. “The Inverted Frontier” is the title of the series.

Read: “The Speed of Time” (Jay Lake): Well, what do you expect, when members of your species listen to the voices from space?

Written: 226 words.

I did successfully observe this, so intensively that I could not get out of bed until after 10! Although next year Nightvale and Sage will both be officially grownup cats.

Once i was able to escape, I did the shopping and the other shopping and the pastrami and the additional shopping and a lot of crafting in Shop Titans so I could complete my bounty before the deadline and some writing (not last thing at night!) and reading, instead of being a useless lump all day.

At dinner time, Marith and. went to Monkeycat Towers to eat many barbecues and bask in the affection of friends. People said many nice things about me, just because we were celebrating my birthday or something. I am not as good at eating barbecue as I used to be, but I’m better at accepting compliments. About even on accepting parasite-rated chocolate cream pies.

Read: Spy x Family vol 11 (Tatsuya Endo): Of course Anya used her powers to get through it

Read: The Tiger Won’t Eat The Dragon Yet vol 1 (Hachi Inaba): Once upon a time(?) in a land where beasts can talk and sometimes take human shape, a tiger brings down a young dragon. She decides he’s too small to eat now, so she should raise him to be a more suitable meal, and that’s where things start to go wrong. The beasts have clothes in their human forms (suspiciously modern ones in the dragon’s case) but there’s otherwise no sign of civilization or humans, so I guess it’s like a fable.

Written: 227. Could have been more, but I caught up on this instead.

Yay me, I guess? I could have justified taking the day off work, and in fact should have since I have twenty days of vacation to use up this year, but instead I went to the office and ate beef and eggplant and fried rice and helped some customers.

Read: She Professed Herself Pupil of the Wise Man vol 1 (dicca*suemitsu, Ryusen Hirotsugu, fuzichoco): VR game, can’t log out, but the best summoner in the game is flung thirty years into the future and stuck in the girly avatar he was fiddling with as an alt to his Srs Bzns Elder Sage avatar. Now there’s one or more wars coming, his buddy who lived through the entire thirty years has spurred a military-industrial revolution, etc. Feels very choppy, probably because it’s only taking the high points from the original light novels and isn’t meant to stand on its own.

Read: My Happy Marriage vol 1 (Akumi Agitogi, Rito Kohsaka, Tsukiho Tsukioka): So far very similar to the anime. Maybe we’re getting lore in different spots, but it’s the same lore. Maybe the trip to town went differently? Or maybe what I’m remembering is from a later trip. Anyway, Miyo-ella and her horrifying abusive family and her beautiful fiancé.

Read: Cascade Failure (LM Sagas): It does successfully have some A Long Way To A Small Angry Planet found-family energy, but it’s all betrayals and murder plans instead of interspecies romance. The world-building is not great, planets are bigger than that, which means slower; no future character ever needs to make more than a single C20 cultural reference per series in which they appear; and even though we here in 2024 are in a consolidation phase of the capitalist hellscape, I am dubious about a single megacorp owning the entire galactic arm. On the other hand, I stayed up until a million o’clock at night to finish it.

Written: 130 more of adventure, the parts the PCs wouldn’t see if they sat in town instead of engaging with the adventure. Seems unlikely they’ll do that in practice, although I really need to test it before taking it to a con. For a change.

Happy birthday, Nonny!

I had to get up early for bonus meetings, which are actually a feature of every normal Tuesday now but that doesn’t make me like them any more. I had no brain, I did some work, I read some more GLOG stuff, I coughed up a bunch of mucus, I read an essay about how Tolkien orcs and D&D orcs are in fact still racist no matter how much you say “it’s right there on the page they aren’t human” or “Professor Tolkien would never”. It also convinced me that D&D-style stats are bad, even if you manage to avoid racial modifiers (which hardly anyone does). All the “natural ability” or “innate potential” type stats are like thinking your IQ is what matters, instead of what skills and decisions you actually make with it. This does affect my game design thoughts, since I was already tending toward BitD-style actions or Castle Falkenstein-style skills for the Champions thing.

Played: Nothing. Not only is Ken busy with Nonny’s birthday, Vivian got her brain electrified today.

Written: FAIL. Too many snuggles, not enough free hands.

 

I took off work today, because my managers keep telling me to take more time off, and it seems as good an excuse for a holiday as any. Ayse insisted on taking me to kittens and lunch; how was I supposed to resist? The kittens were very rambunctious, which made it hard to befriend them, but they were adorable anyway.

I went home to vegetate for a while, and then went to Ayse and Ken’s for delicious Thai food and friendship and non-cursed frogurt and then Amerivision. It was actually Eurovisiontastic, despite our worries! Not all the acts understood how to use the stage, and there were a probably excessive number of half-dressed backup dancers, but overall it was properly campy and had a good variety. Oklahoma K-pop was good, the pink one with the keytar solo was good, fire was good, cowboy boot rap was just weird. There were some technical difficulties and I stayed up too late, but it was lots of fun. Nonny also got to stay up late.

Words: FAIL. I meant to do some writing during the afternoon, but instead I did pretty much nothing. It was not an auspicious start, but it was very on-brand.