Tag: cleaners

It is one of my favorite punctuation marks, although I like most of them.

What’s not my favorite is knowing I have to get up special in the morning, instead of according to routine, so I wake up early and lie there wondering if my alarm didn’t go off and I messed everything up and have to go live in a cardboard box under the freeway overpass.

Read (manga): Doughnuts Under a Crescent Moon vol 4 (Shio Usui): They finally admit their feelings for each other (with some encouragement from others), the end! Yay ace representation and all, but them both being ace makes it feel like the author was trying to distance themself from the idea of women having sex. Still very cute, and the little sister is definitely going to take over the world.

Read (novel): Heretical Fishing vol 4 (Haylock Jobson): More OP cultivator fishing adventures, this time with a boat, and then also some plot monsters introduced in the last like third of the book. I know what happened to the world has been hinted at for a long time, but I’m not sure it’s as interesting as Corporal Claws gaining nigh-infinite power.

Written (game design): 222:

(We have to pretend that the 13th Age module Eyes of the Stone Thief
didn’t finish the idea of living dungeons and put a bow on it. Maybe we
can find a better name.)

Of course after writing that, I read Kickstarter updates for a
far-future science-fantasy game, and now I want ancient wonders and
cities built around still-functioning services from before and
everything. This is because I have no actual thoughts of my own, I just
read the Internet and remix it like an LLM.

Thinking about cities built around ancient wonders reminds me to wonder
how mythic this should be, and then what I mean by “mythic” except “like
Glorantha”. I think it means the supernatural being personified: if a
wizard casts a spell to make a wind blow, that’s whatever, but if they
chain the North Wind in their basement, that’s mythic. This definitely
includes direct works of named gods (eg, the Forge of Hephaestus). I had
been leaning away from that, though, with gods as nameplates hung on the
impersonal natural flow of the universe, people turned into monsters by
their own fates and not by snotty deities, etc. D&D, despite having
multiple lists of gods in the back of the book, is also like this,
possibly because all divine quirkiness has to be flattened out to fit
into the power-by-level curve. Also, having a specific god that
does/has specific things is a non-generic setting element.

Another way to look at it is that in a mythic world, you can negotiate
with every natural phenomenon, or that everything is a phemonenon with a
person behind it you can bargain with. The moon is Selena’s most
precious jewel, not a place you can go or even a gravity rock. This is
definitely a great basis for a game, but it’s not at all the way I
normally lean, at least for worldbuilding, so let’s not do that. This
time.

An exception might be the afterlife. I want to avoid the D&D thing
of souls getting sorted into planes according to alignment (which
doesn’t even exist in our game) and then staying there. Reuse!
Recycle! Upcycle! Reduce? I mean, just because it’s fantasy doesn’t
mean there has to be an immortal soul. Minds are plenty good enough.
On the other hand, this is fantasy, and surviving beyond death is
a very popular dream. But if there’s recycling, there should be
processing. Grinding. Melting. Reforging. And, naturally, some
sort of celestial apparatus (probably not the mechnical kind) to
do it all. An imperfect apparatus, which is why sometimes memories
of past lives seep through. Maybe it’s decayed, maybe it’s become
corrupt (villainous eunuchs of heaven?), maybe humans just don’t
understand what it’s actually doing; in any case it’s another source
of trouble. Bonus trouble if there are multiple factions of soul
processors who want different things and get the brilliant idea to
manipulate society in different ways.

This has implications for resurrection, namely that you have to get the
soul before it enters the hopper, but that’s fine. If somebody claims to
have come back from the dead after a thousand years, that should
definitely be sus.

Do only people who can spend Harmony have souls? Nah, that seems rude.
Being able to spend Harmony might be something desirable in a soul,
though.

Still need a good short in-world name for that. “Touched”? I think most
people who speak US English understand that it’s both “touched by the
divine” and “crazy”. Actually, we need multiple terms.

Sure, they’re handy and probably deserve a day.

Had to get up early for cleaners, who put things in very odd places but did clean the surfaces as I required.

Read (manga): Komi Can’t Communicate vol 34 (Tomohito Oda): The cultural festival, featuring lots of ramen. They’re like halfway through senior year, there can’t be that many volumes left for Komi to reach 100!

Written (game design): 290:

Backgrounds are freeform, we don’t need much of a list, but starting
feats (powers? abilities? schticks?) need both a list of options to pick
from, and (eventually, or maybe first) rules for creating new options.
Although it should probably be point-based, I’m not sure we need costs
other than 1, 2, and -1, at least for the basic list, although I might
be horribly wrong.

What goes in this list? Definitely the physical and magical advantages (or
disadvantages) of ancestries: enhanced senses, talking to animals, being
huge or tiny, breathing water, resistance to poison, stuff like that. If
we’re going classless, then the basic enabling abilities like being able
to cast spells would be here. A lot of D&D abilities like being able to
stab people in the back don’t count, because anybody can do them.
Strength, higher starting MP, starting HP, maybe faster movement (or
possibly the inverse of all of these as disads). Maybe a higher starting
rating for an action. Maybe extra backgrounds. If we’re classless, then
a larger or smaller attack die than the default would go here (otherwise
it would depend on your class, like Dungeon World). Maybe separate
attack dice for melee and ranged and magic, but that depends on combat
to get sorted out.

Earlier I suggested everybody who can spend MP has a natural talent they
can spend them on, apart from any class or class-like abilities, so that
would be a free pick on a sublist here.

If there aren’t any classes, then everything like combat techniques,
spells, opening locks with ki powers, summoning shadow monsters, turning
undead, etc, etc, would be on this list too, which isn’t bad but we
might need to set up a good system of prerequisites.

Hey, where’s my creativity and innovation?

Had to get up early again for the cleaners and then still do work. Bah. Also discovered Mysterious Shoes. The cleaners disclaim them, and Marith says she doesn’t recognize them, but nobody else is ever in my apartment because I’m a failure at people.

Read (manga): Mysterious Disappearances vol 5 (Nujima): All their messing around with mysteries has attracted the attention of the Queen of Cats and her truck-sized minions. Nobody is mean to a cat on-screen, but there is nevertheless cat-related sadness of a familiar kind.

Read (anthology): Covenants: Four Tales of Agreements (Moe Lane):Four stories that are not horror, but are in horror settings. A couple are in C19 Europe ravaged by undead of various kinds, there’s one in the same setting as Ghosts on a Alien Wind, and one in a Mythos far future. Okay, maybe they are horror after all.

Written (catgirl): 160 of notes. Maybe they shouldn’t use cell phones at all? But so convenient, even if they aren’t smartphones!

Apparently one I am unable to celebrate, because I am too horrible.

Read (graphic novel): We Called Them Giants (Kieron Gillen, Stephanie Hans, Clayton Cowles): Two girls try to survive in the post-apocalypse, which goes different than they expected. Not a happy story, but only a normal amount of sadness, I think. Could get taught in school.

Written (catgirl): 161.

I am ahead of my time! (I ate tortilla chips yesterday, along with way too much cheese.)

Did not manage to get up for the optional early meeting, even though I probably really should have. Too many customers, not enough brains.

Cleaners came in the afternoon and rearranged everything.

Read (manga): My Girlfriend’s Not Here Today vol 2 (Kiyoko Iwami): Like the author says, this is a manga about cheating! None of these girls is a particularly great person, not even the one being cheated on, but that’s how you get the mega-drama.

Written (catgirl): 161.

What? How is that not on Thanksgiving?

Why did I tell the cleaners it was okay to come so early? I didn’t know I was going to sleep so badly due to arm widget and furry legsnugglers, but it was pretty early even so. Blugh.

Work is still much the way I left it, although all my coworkers have more cases than I remember. I need to remind them to assign me the ones that don’t come in when I’m assigning.

Read: The Most Heretical Last Boss Queen vol 3 (Bunko Matsuura, Tenichi, Suzunosuke): Time is passing, the main character is growing up and maybe even learning something about leadership.

Written: 332, more notes. Probably all dumb.

Hi Kit!

More customer calls today, but at least I could do them from my own pit, with a black cat on top of me. (I don’t know why Nightvale was suddenly the snuggly one today, but no complaints.)

Read: I Can’t Say No to the Lonely Girl vol 4 (Kashikaze): Yay smooches! Shifting focus to another couple, maybe? Probably not that one, but maybe there will be more.

Read: There’s No Freaking Way I’ll Be Your Lover! Unless… vol 6 (Musshu, Teren Mikami, Eku Takeshima): Gaah, MC, just admit you’re super-gay already and revel in the number of exceptionally hot girls who are into you! (Internalized heteronormativity is a hell of a drug, as they say.)

Written: 230.

I have some of those!

Read: Monster Psalms (Matt Guss): 31 standard D&D monster types (goblin, dragon, skeleton, naga, sphinx, …) each with half a dozen tables for unique origins, appearances, motivations, powers, mutations, etc. No stat blocks, but when mechanics come up, it’s clearly generic OSR. Unedited prerelease version, but already has some good bits.

Written: 172.

I did wear underwear today, so I guess that’s all right.

Got trained on our new procedure for replacing the automatic case assignment popup with manual assignment, just like I did twenty or thirty years ago. Proof that software doesn’t have to be AI to be awful.

Cleaners helpfully swept up my almost-entirely-empty balcony, and then I found the trash dumpster had been emptied this morning so I was able to throw away the last two boxes. I have more boxes that should get dumped, but they are not blocking maintenance so I can do that later.

Read: Navigational Entanglements (Aliette de Bodard): A different space-Vietnamese empire, where hyperspace navigation overlaps with supernatural martial arts. Four navigators who are neurodivergent or suck up too much or not enough or otherwise are unpopular get sent to hunt a monster. Politics and lesbian crushes ensue.

Written: 297.

Humans have flying into space, however clumsily, for about sixty years. I wonder what it will look like after another sixty? (“Spaceflight? Oh, yeah, we used to do that before World of Warcraft XXXVII came out.”)

Used a fact about shark eyes in the meeting today, but I’m running low on facts.

Read: D&D5e Monsters of the Multiverse (Jeremy Crawford, et al): I usually like monster books, but maybe corporate D&D books don’t count. It wasn’t bad, but most of the monsters were familiar from previous editions (gnoll flind, Zuggtmoy, etc) and 5e writeups are kind of boring because they have to be very mechanical for the proper videogame feel. I do like that the new PC race writeups don’t have stat modifiers, only size/move/darkvision/special powers. Now you can play any class as any of these races without hamstringing yourself.

Written: 252. Main Character, why are you not making the terrible decision? Do I need to put the flashback off until later?

Also International Day Against Police Brutality.

Customers, learn to pace yourselves! You don’t all have to break everything on Friday!

Written: 104. It’s still in the triple digits, so it counts! Even if I have to unplan a bunch of this stuff later.

Had to wake up early for cleaners, but then managed to go back to sleep like a useless lump for a while. My body refused to produce medical samples, so eventually I gave up and went grocery shopping. The UPS place is open tomorrow morning, so if my body cooperates before then, I can drop the sample off before gaming tomorrow.

Thought some more about game design. I think I had some of these ideas before. They weren’t any good then either.

Written: 267 new words, plus a little editing.

Got cleaners in to make my apartment slightly less horrible. I need to get a whole bunch of stuff off the floor or into the trash if I want to have cats in here, though.

Played: Lancer. Nobody remembered how this game works after Ken cancelled three weeks in a row, but Vivian has brain electrodes, so that’s cool.

Written: FAIL.

Back to capitalism, although maybe not very competently. Really I was pretty useless all day, but I did manage to brave the freezing Californian cold to get Taiwan special beef noodles. They were really good, although possibly I shouldn’t have eaten them all in one meal. I think not eating for a couple of days shrank my stomach.

I am too lame to clean up my own mess (also I have no cleaning supplies) but I got the regular cleaners in a bit early and now all my floors are walkable again.

Read: Katalepsis ch 15.1-19, 16.1-9, 17.1-15 (Hungry): Back to Earth, then lots of new friends (although friendship means different things to different entities), and another appearance of a rat bastard.

Written: FAIL.

Boo, customer calls. At least this one only lasted a few hours, and was not much interfered with by cleaners.

Read: Vigor Mortis ch 105-135 (Thundamoo): It’s really not surprising that the arc with a breakout from the ultimate-security prison gives us more of Vita’s backstory.

Written: FAIL. There is only read and yawn, no write.

Interviewed a candidate, which was not a terrible experience, although of course I cannot say anything about them.

I finally read a bunch of stories from Apex Magazine that I had bookmarked, and they were pretty uncheerful. Content warning for death, despair, slavery, animal death, and assorted misery.

Read: “Nine Theories of Time” (Spencer Nitkey): Sadness about humans.

Read: “Hank in the South Dakota Sun” (Stephanie Kraner): Sadness about trains.

Read: “The Fruit of the Princess Tree” (Sage Tyrtle): Surprisingly, not unmitigated sadness. One character manages to emerge from the slough of despond.

Read: “On The Day You Spend Forever With Your Dog” (Adam R Shannon): Sadness about dogs.

Read: “Copper, Iron, Blood and Love” (Mari Ness): Sadness about ravens.

Read: “Lazarus and the Amazing Kid Phoenix” (Jennifer Giesbrecht): Another story in which the characters can change things, although it’s not clear how much they do. Also less abstract than a lot of the others. Definitely my favorite of this lot.

Written: 566 kitten words (one block over from the Beast), 1843 so far this week.