Tag: gaming

The dwarf planet with surprising amounts of geology, or the Sailor Scout? Both good!

Played: Librarians Errant. Another two-fight session, first against goblin and hobgoblin mercenaries sent to hunt down the PCs get their wolf-riding asses handed to them, and then against whatever hideous cow monster Beasley Knees missummoned when Lily’s shoggoth book bit in him the middle of the incantation. There was a lot of dwarf-trampling in that fight, but literacy prevailed in the end, and Thaïs got to play hero to the local girls. Nobody even got ridden out of town on a rail!

Written: 183.

Hello, please accept this gift of space yogurt.

Had no brain and accomplished almost nothing at work. I have to get the things done tomorrow! And not stay up forever the night before getting up early to commute.

Played: Lancer. We spent the entire session trying to make a plan to accomplish our really stupid goal, without managing to make it any less stupid. It is both what we clearly need to do to find out what’s going on and what the module expects us to do, though.

Written: Only 118, but I got to talk to a Real Writer about ideas I wasn’t having and now can move that tiny bit forward.

Or is it Canadian Maple Syrup Heist Day?

I was expecting to not have power until sometime today, based on the PG&E status page, but in fact it was restored overnight and I did not end up having to go into the office today. That’s good, because there was a surprise early morning meeting that would have made commuting a pain. This makes twice that I’ve ordered goat curry and then not gone into the office. I will eat you someday, goats!

Everything in my fridge and freezer has become untrustworthy, so I had to get pizza while getting gooshyfood for the cats. Fortunately I liked the pizza and they like the gooshyfood.

Played: Lancer. We got to make some decisions as both groups, but then the entire situation was overtaken by events. Well, this module is advertised as being about the traumas of war.

Written: 157.

Another one that should be every day.

Successfully made it to gaming despite the weather, then successfully made it home despite the intense weather. It, as they say on the Internets, fucken WIMDY.

Unfortunately, when I got home, I had neither Internets nor electricity. Usually PG&E gets it fixed pretty quickly, but everything was still out after I took a nap, so I went back to sleep. This was probably not the best thing I could have done, but it was easy.

Played: Librarians Errant. A two-fight session! First, as the team was seeing off the astral pirates, their ship was attacked by a dragon made of evil books and its sycophants in a literal flame war. They drove off the dragon and saved the books, but now the githyanki are stuck in Waterdeep trying to arrange transfer credit at the university. Then Shia was accosted by an origami butterfly that led the team cross-country to a deserted mill/smuggling den where Gladys’s minions were up to no good. They managed to set an ambush instead of just charging in, which was only partly successful because 5e doesn’t let you block enemies’ movement but did involve Grumman stealing a coach with a hootin’ and a hollerin’. The villains escaped, but the senior librarian was rescued in good shape and admitted the team might be worthy to be called librarians, but only very junior ones and only until next time they screw up.

Written: THWARTED.

No pie for me, still waiting on the medical-financial complex to refill my medication.

Got up early to meet, did another work.

Kit’s FIFTIETH BOOK, Death By Irish Whiskey, is out! It’s the fifth in a series, but buy it anyway!

Played: Lancer. Still playing as the corporate goons. Pretty sure the “corporate execs” we rescued were actually locals who hacked the system, but that’s an issue for the IT department. Besides, we’re not actually in favor of killer robots murdering people, even if altruism isn’t in our job description. Kelsey’s character got to run around slamming into people like a wrecking ball, so it was all good.

Written: 103, which is still in the triple digits, if only barely.

A gaming session is like a playdate for gamers, right? Definitely a comparable maturity level!

Played: Librarians Errant. Thaïs is doing okay at rescuing herself by pushing Gladys the turncoat librarian out a window, but doesn’t mind at all when her friends show up to help. There’s a comparatively minor kerfuffle and then everyone escapes with the books Gladys bought at auction, which are only moderately helpful in tracking down the Education, but take that, Gladys! Serves you right for locking cute girls in boxes! Martin is still nowhere to be found, so the next day the group is given into the care of Garth, an extremely hard-ass Librarian Errant who immediately takes them back down to the Elemental Plane of Books or whatever it is to help clean up the hellfrog damage. Naturally, they barely get started before Thaïs trips over some githyanki book thieves and a running fight breaks out. Alas, the githyanki excel at fighting in the narrow stacks and Lily is forced to surrender when she’s the last one standing. She does talk the githyanki out of taking a book that’s not on their list of books that the library stole from them, but the astral pirates make their getaway pretty much entirely successfully. Bah!

Maybe next time I’ll remember what shocking grasp is for.

Written: 141. I may need to delete it all, but that’s a problem for Future Me.

Every day I play Numbword, Connections, Wordle, Waffle, Squaredle, and Squardle (as well as Metazooa and Chrono), so uh it me.

I skipped out on the 7:30 all hands meeting, but I didn’t manage to get back to sleep, and also apparently there was actual content, so that was a poor choice.

Played: Lancer, this time for real. The corporate goons successfully fought off the robot army squad and rescued the major investor and his NHP expertise. Now they have a better understanding of how much trouble the colony is in, but maybe they can send those random do-gooders off to do something on another planet where they can’t get in the way of necessary corporate activity.

Written: 139 of outlining. I think I have a good cliffhanger, although I don’t know if it’s end of book or some random chapter or what, because I have no idea how many words this outline is supposed to turn into.

Programmers that make software? Programmers that arrange convention panels? Both okay in my book.

The first actual gaming of the year is unsurprisingly D&D. Time to roll a d20 to confirm that nothing happens!

Played: Librarians Errant. We start with the fight against animated books that was threatened last time, and the team pretty much get their asses handed to them, since each book is about as strong as one PC and they outnumber the team three to one. Fortunately their mentor shows up to save them and forbid them from returning to the Main Branch of Library Space until they are much higher level, so nobody actually dies. He also tells them to absolutely not engage with the renegade Librarian Errant who got past them in the stacks. Naturally, as soon as they’re done doing cleanup work and get to go pillage an estate sale, they run into her again. They do try to get word back, but their mentor is nowhere to be found, and shadowing somebody is the opposite of engaging, right? They each stake out the snooty auction hall in accordance with their personal idiom, but only Thaïs, who gets a job as one of the waiters because she looks good in a uniform, gets kidnapped. Next session, villainous monologue! I’m not sure what Thaïs’s resistance to that will be.

Written: 202. A bunch is still outlining, but maybe it will turn into real fiction.

I dunno, probably none of the interesting days want to be this close to Christmas.

Last 1:1 with my boss for the year, all is chill.

Played: Lancer. We played the team of corporate goons sent to protect the colony’s valuable resources, with completely different mechs than the random weirdos that are trying to make things better for people. After the setup, we only got one round into the combat, but surely next session (whenever it is, maybe Boxing Day) will be exciting.

Written: FAIL.

I didn’t think mountains really needed a day, you can’t miss them, but okay.

I did some work, I guess, and then I did gaming homework. My Lancaster build is almost certainly the worst one ever, and I must never show it to Ken, but hopefully he won’t ask too many questions about it. (He absolutely will, and will think I am stupid.)

Written: FAIL, mech design doesn’t count.

These cats are very insistent that they are entitled to three gooshy meals a day and a minimum of eight hours of snuggles!

Played: Librarians Errant. The team’s first assignment this session is tracking down the entrepreneur jerk who tried to hoard all copies of an important textbook. This requires beating up her little gang of  undergrad goons, but Thaïs gets to use a second-level spell and anyway the opposition are kind of wimpy. Only Flint gets beat up much before the team returns to the library in triumph. The next day, as they sort books, the library is invaded by bullywugs looking for volume one of the magical series! Every librarian is mobilized, and the team is set guarding a door deep in the lower lower stacks. Bullywugs come from the sewers, so this is not as pointless as it might seem, but it’s still a surprise when a  very senior librarian appears, chased by bullywugs and fire-breathing giant toads. She is definitely authorized, and also the shelves of archaic legal tomes are now on fire, so the team piles through the door after her and tries to lead the bullies off in a different direction through the maze of even more obscure (and now burning) stacks. Then they find the opening to the Elemental Plane of Books, or something, and the magic card catalog. Thaïs was already looking for books on shoggoth-banishing, so she makes a catalog card for it, and everybody follows the card across the walkway of flying books to the book island. The book on the podium tries to bite Thaïs’s hand off, so she zaps it, and we break as the other books flap to attack.

Watched: Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts 4-6: A master villain! Mysterious powers! Metalheads! The shortest romance subplot ever! Probably for the best, as Kipo is way younger than I thought.

Written: FAIL.

A mysterious figure who abducts and devours poorly-behaved children is all well and good, but I’d rather be eaten by the Yule Cat for not wearing my Christmas socks.

I can see the line on my phone (which I only check one million times per day) go up when I expect it do, but it seems to also randomly go up at some times and not at others, so hell if I know how this carbs thing works.

Had to get up early because it’s Tuesday but then that was preempted by getting up even earlier for a different meeting. Ugh.

Played: Lancer. Two weeks in a row!  We finished in the fight from last week in like half a round and then steamrollered the negotiations between the various factions of the rightful inhabitants of the planet and the corporate newcomers by showing them our spaceship. 110% Pancakes brings us success once again! Next week we’re playing the corporate team getting murdered by possessed machinery, so I guess I should actually build that Lancaster.

Written: FAIL. I should be working on the other scene, or more productively, trying to outline the project that got bogged down in detail. I don’t have an ending, exactly, but I do at least have a list of mysteries that must be revealed.

A natural followup to Crystal Skull Day, I guess?

Back to work! It wasn’t bad, I just don’t like getting up in the morning.

Played: Lancer. Of course our attempt to get the non-corporate refugees to safety was interrupted by killer robots. We got most of the civilians out with Abrakyl’s power to make everything teleport and teleport and teleport, but the victory condition is to have all of us inside the zone and none of the enemy in the zone at some point after round three. We got to the middle of round three before having to call it a night, and it’s looking pretty good for next week. Roll20 gave me the good numbers this time and I got one or more crits every time I did a barrage, so the worst enemy is gone, as is one of the foliage management units. I was almost cool!

Read: My Dear, Curse-Casting Vampiress vol 1 (Chisaki Kanai): An elite anti-vampire cop with amnesia breaks a legendary vampire-killing vampire out of secret government custody. Together, they fight crime vampires. A weird mix of awkward romance between the leads and action-horror with body parts as spell components and casual use of high-level pyrokinesis in downtown Shibuya.

Written: FAIL.

Not sure exactly what that’s about, but better not offend The Skull.

Played: Librarians Errant. We were chasing down a grad student who was using the overdue book for clues to treasure in a dungeon full of unexplained monsters and improbable traps, so it was a surprisingly traditional D&D adventure. The treasure was a book that didn’t belong to the library, so we left the grad student and visiting scholar to their tawdry het romance novel and noped out with the book we were sent for and some incidental loot. Level UP!

That was pretty much it for today.

Written: FAIL.

While I was on vacation, I saw a very cute baby who can stand up while holding onto things (which lets him get off the Baby Preserve), went on a three-mile hike with Ken and Dave, got help with Squaredle, ate a million unhealthy foods, saw many people I rarely see, and stayed up too late playing board games. I slept more than I wanted although not as much as my body wanted. It was a good vacation, but now, despite traffic, I am back. Marith did a great job taking care of Sage and Nightvale, because she is Best Lizard, but she was not in a position to feed them three gooshy meals a day, so they were glad to see me.

Played: Dominion. I did not win, although maybe I could have if the game had gone on longer.

Played: Ra. New to me, all about drawing tiles from the bag and bidding on them with numbers. As often happens, I seized the lead in the first epoch and then got no more points the rest of the game.

Played: Holiday Fluxx. Like all Fluxx variants, it is fundamentally Fluxx, and this is the rule of Fluxx.

Played: Puerto Rico. Moral depravity and I wasn’t even good at it! (Although neither was anybody else; it was a really close game and late at night.)

Played: Dungeon World. Jus wanted to play D&D, but nobody else volunteered and I wasn’t going to do that, so I compromised with an iron fist. An immolator, a rogue, a druid, and a wizard walk into a dungeon… and SET IT ON FIRE! Also there was some tussling with mooks and mutant frogs and traps, but by the time they got down to the heart of the dungeon, Jus had run out of gas. However, we stopped in a good place, and only had four players who are all likely to be up for gaming next visit, so I kept the character sheets and my terrible notes and maybe we’ll pick it up again.

Read: Perils & Princesses: You are fairy-tale princesses, going on D&D adventures. You have Resolve, Grace, Wit, a fairy godmother, a magic gift, one magic die per level(max four), and the contents of your inventory slots, because despite the fairy-tale theme, it’s a GLOG game. It has the usual D&D problems of “roll d20 to have nothing happen” and “everybody’s a bucket of hit points” but the system is simple and mostly player-facing. Also, because all lists and examples are numbered, it’s possible to create a character entirely randomly, which makes me want to try it for a con game.

Written: VACATION

As opposed to yesterday, which was just my personal cat day!

The cats are still very feline. Sage is remarkably energetic for a cat who has never had a single morsel of food in her entire life, ever, although after eating an entire cat of wet food she cuddled in my arms for an extended period. Nightvale jumped onto Marith’s shoulders when she came to visit, which I can only interpret as a sign of approval.

Played: Librarians Errant. After being manipulated into alarming situations by professors and/or sororities the library had offended, and finding that the eldritch tentacles unleashed by Flint and Shia in the first episode had taken to nibbling on the town’s supply of fine confections, our librarians junior library staff head back to Koboldtown only to find it being bullied by bullywugs! There’s a big fight, but the important parts are that Flint leaps down from the rooftop and chops the bullywug leader right in half, and Lily gets swallowed by a giant frog and carried off. Once they track her down, there’s another fight, but the leader of the bullywugs escapes with the book that was the entire reason they came down here. Thaïs only used one of her spell slots, so this was obviously a less strenuous adventure than last time, no matter what the other characters say.

Watched: Helluva Boss 2.7: Another Fizzarolli episode, so sadly lacking in Loona or Millie, but otherwise good. Because seriously, fuck that guy!

Written: FAIL. There were cats that needed snuggles! But I did get caught up here and even figured out how to post pictures, so apparently the cats are less distracting.

But isn’t that every day?

Apparently it was also sleep day, or more accurately, forget to set an alarm day, so I slept through my 1-to-1 with my boss. Fortunately he is cool, so it was okay. I even did a small amount of work.

Played: Lancer, kinda. We still had no Brooks, so we were able to wrap up the previous set-piece mecha battle and reap the rewards, we didn’t move onto the next one. I think we did make a couple of dice rolls, though, maybe?

Written: FAIL.

Isn’t that every day ending in y since at least sometime in November 2016?

You’d think the night after a night of poor sleep would have extra sleep, but no. That’s not even counting having to get up an hour and a half early to start a morning of four meetings and an afternoon of dentistry and laundry and not being able to eat until almost bedtime because my face was numb.

Played: Lancer (without Brooks). We scared away the smaller giant bile worms, but the larger ones had to be put down to make way for Alien Archaeology. On the upside, the explosions revealed a discovery of even greater significance. Also all those points I put into Agility paid off and I didn’t get slimed even once.

Read: Komi Can’t Communicate vol 27 (Tomohito Oda): In this volume, Komi and crew play Among Us, and then some people talk about kissing. Hardly any actual kissing takes place, because high school manga, but it’s cute anyway.

Written: FAIL.

 

After missing about a million sessions, we finally had Alternate Sunday Gaming and started Librarians Errant. After being assigned to get overdue books back from students and causing pretty much a riot (there were also exploding gophers involved), we got dragged into the search for a lost set of books, almost eaten by giant rants, ditched in the sewers with teenaged kobolds, almost eaten by giant frogs, and fed hot chocolate by the kobolds. There were two fights, Thaïs had two spell slots to cast thunderwave, it worked out perfectly. Surely next session will go just as well.

I was accosted by an antivaxxer at the bus stop. I told her she’s insane, but we parted without violence. (Should I have been nicer? I dunno, she was trying to kill me with covid.)

Written: FAIL.

How is she FOURTEEN?!

Made it back from the con, although there was a lot more walking than I expected. Transit is not the greatest on Sunday evening. (Okay, transit around here is never the greatest, we should tax Google and eBay and all those suckweasels however much they’re spending on their own busses.)

CON REPORT!

Thursday was just opening ceremonies (which I missed most of because my credit union wanted to protect me from sketchy weirdos using my card to pay for hotel rooms in Burlingame) and such. The fashion show was delightful, because it was normal people in whatever strange outfits and everybody got straight 10s from the judges. I had stupid feelings about some of the femme-presenting people in the fashion show being attractive, but they were just as stupid as the feelings about none of the gamers I know being interested in BBC. There was some kind of dance party, but I went to bed at a reasonable time so I could game all weekend.

Read: Serwa Boateng’s Guide to Vampire Hunting (Roseanne A Brown): The daughter of a Ghanaian-American vampire hunting family gets stuck in middle school while her parents are off doing important stuff, and has to cobble together a completely illegitimate vampire-hunting team from the kids she’s stuck in racist detention with, whether the gods want to help or not. Ghanaian vampires have a firefly theme instead of a bat theme, but are not any less horrible.

Friday, I had three games scheduled and they all went off according to (somebody’s) plan.

Played: Invisible Sun. I played Crystal, a Stalwart Ardent of the Order of Makers who Writhes and Squirms. The player to my left played literally three raccoons in a trenchcoat, and the one to my right played someone who wanted to become a bodyless miasma, and we met an NPC who had a star for a head, so having no bones was comparatively normal. The GM warned us this game is not ideal for one-shots, because it’s lore-heavy and is supposed to have lots of collaborative worldbuilding and some of the classes (like the Makers) are heavily reliant on downtime actions, but we had fun anyway. As recent returnees from the false world of Earth, we got sucked into a lucrative but crazed heist that involved going into the Noösphere to recover a secret that had been known only by someone now dead. Instead of deciding what my magical glass weapon was, I used the one spell I had available for immediate use to vanish from everyone’s perceptions and my minor ability to have sticky tentacles instead of arms to yoink the physical embodiment of the secret while everybody else faffed about with the guardian memory-construct.

Played: Dreamland. I played Bazun, barmaid (Servant) to the traveling Wineseller. We also had a Ratcatcher who pretty much stole the show, and halfway through, the last player joined and played an Industrialist. Feeling in need of money, we set out for the House of the Gnoles deep in the Enchanted Wood, past even the zoogs. Along the way, we caused a British Cultural Appropriation Orientalist’s palace of decontextualized exotica to disintegrate, and then got caught up in a plot where the queen of Dream London was trying to steal her adopted daughter’s skin to create a map of new Dream territories to conquer. Surely the bridge troll falling in love with Bazun (who turned out to be a middle-aged male cult leader in central Asia in the waking world) would not go on to cause any problems whatsoever.

Played: Dungeon Crawl Classics. Okay, this one was pretty much D&D, but I figured I would check it out since it uses d5s and d7s and other potentially cursed random number generators. I played Enzo, a level 2 Warrior. Since it was a two-hour slot, the cleric got a vision to go to a location and recover a relic to save the world and we skipped right to it. It was the kind of dungeon where a room is just filled with living terrain that knows you aren’t worthy, don’t ask why your cleric can’t make that, very old-school. The stained glass constructs that shot at us were a pain, but really we got through the dungeon without much combat except the wizard sniping them from range. Spellcasters can be powerful, but the effect of a spell, from bare minimum to ridiculous, depends on how well they roll on their spellcasting check, and they have a chance of failing and possibly losing the spell, so I don’t know whether they’re actually more powerful than fighters. Too small a sample size. Anyway, we saved the world and I went to bed at a reasonable time again.

Saturday I hadn’t been able to get into anything I wanted for the morning slot, so I went to Games on Demand.

Played: Slugblaster Turbo X. I played Riya, who had Grit and a Robot Companion. This is the streamlined version of Slugblaster for two-hour one-shots at cons and the like. The GM was the creator of Slugblaster, so that was great. We went to a party in another dimension, got chased by a mutant dinosaur, almost caused a giant mecha rampage, got my robot Ziggy smashed up more than once, and made a connection with another crew. Also I got to talk to the cool girl running the music at the party, although I did not actually save her from the hand missiles.

Played: Plant Girl Game. I played Veria the Echeveria plant-girl. This is possibly the coziest game ever written. You are all plant-kids (“You don’t have to be a girl, but you do have to be a plant.”), maybe your mom is a witch, you must save your town from some kind of ecological disaster. In our case it was an infestation of ground squirrels due to the drought, and we put so much work into getting the town to relocate the squirrels instead of killing them. Fortunately we had the help of the awesome old punk librarian. There was an interesting two-dimensional age thing (social/developmental age vs how long since you came out of the ground) that didn’t get explored much because we only had four hours.

Played: Confluence: the Living Archive. I played Whispering Gallery, the fallen god of stage secrets, because this was not actually about Space Library, but non-European secondary-world fantasy. I think there were technically humans, but nobody played one, we had salamander-people and shark-rabbit people and mouse-people and people made out of living colors and whatnot. Also there was a barter/reputation economy, gravity magic, decentralized-to-nonexistent government, and skywhales. We got drafted by the social welfare org to help recover a botanist’s experimental samples stolen by a notorious villain, despite being kind of sketchy. Best line of the con: “From above, you hear a mousy gasp of gay panic!” That was when Whispering Gallery was swooning into the villainous axolotl-lady’s arms to distract her while the big bruisers surrounded her.

I had something planned for Sunday morning but it got cancelled because the GM caught a cold, so I was back to Games on Demand.

Played: Slugblaster (full-fat version). I played Octa, the Heart with Riftninja Sneakers. This wasn’t run by the creator of the game, but by some people from the company doing the new edition, and we had time to go through the whole process of choosing playbooks and signature gear and rolling up our gear and faction relationships and making a map of what dimensions we knew portals to. The map almost made a loop, so our adventure was trying to find portals to complete it. The Chill made friends with a giant eel, the Smarts took pictures of the custom board-maker’s tools, the Grit exploded a giant robot worm from the inside, and we all just tried to make it through the dimension of squabbling giants and their slug-pope. I got a lot more Style than in the last game, but also more Trouble.

Played: Heart. I played Tenacity, gnoll priestess of the Moon Beneath. Heart is set in the eldritch subway that was built for Spire but immediately went feral and started digging for Hell, and the other horrifying realms it pierced along the way, and it is absolutely a horror game. We started out investigating a rat problem for a tavern so they’d owe us a favor, and ended up facing an agglomeration of undead rats animated by the crown of an ancient god. The weaselly magic-eating vivisectionist swore fealty to the Rat King because he was fine with things growing in his brain, but then I figured out about the crown and started a fight by speaking the secret name of the Goddess. It was horrible and awesome and I did in fact gain a dozen times ultimate power, which was probably not consistent with remaining a person as the word is commonly understood, so the win and loss condition were the same. It was great. Second-best line of the con: “So you just squish your face into the mass of undead rats?” “Once I have the power of a god, I can make a new face.” I did make one mistake along the way, though, since I would have gotten an advance for not leaving the rival priest to be eaten alive by dimension-gnawing rats.

The End!

Things I did better this year than last year:

  • Eating in my room instead of in the loud expensive hotel restaurant full of virus-spewing face holes, so I had time to decompress and play my pad games between scheduled events.
  • Bringing my own food. I only came up with this idea at the last minute, so I didn’t have a lot of variety and ended up getting takeout from the restaurant several times, but if nothing else, it made the morning faster which let me sleep in longer.
  • All mostly lesbians all most of the time (Enzo was a guy, but maybe he was gay, it never came up). Why? Because I want to and nobody can stop me.
  • Spoke up more. Even though I’m a mediocre white guy, I can safely talk more than I did last year, and have more outgoing and active characters. Or maybe people were just humoring me, but nobody kicked me under the table or anything. Whispering Gallery was practically flamboyant!

Things I should do better next year:

  • Hydrate! Hydrate! OK!
  • More masks. There wasn’t a lot of breathing, so it was probably okay, but ideally I would have changed to a new mask halfway through each day.
  • New shoulderbag. The one I have isn’t quite large enough to hold my dice bag along with everything else. Or maybe that means I need a smaller dice bag? No, that’s obviously nonsense!
  • Notebook. If I had had to read any of the notes I chicken-scratched into the margins of my character sheets, it would not have gone well.
  • Contribute to the con. Running a scheduled game didn’t work well last year but maybe I could do Games on Demand or general volunteering.

Written: VACATION.

Or, on my social slack, International Arguing About What Constitutes A Dumpling Day.

Virtual Friday, since I am off for convention-going from tomorrow. I hope my coworkers are not mystified by the notes I left.

Played: Lancer. No mecha battles this time, only being amazed by the [SPOILER] and other [SPOILER]. Mecha battles next time.

Written: FAIL.

Like the right to stare blankly into space all day. That’s in the UN charter, right?

Played: Lancer. We didn’t have Kelsey (job hunting is the worst) and ended up not having much Vivian, so although we did some exploration and found the planet was even less well-surveyed than we already thought, we couldn’t do much diplomacy or NHP investigation.

Read: Shikimori’s Not Just A Cutie vol 3 (Keigo Maki): Shikimori, her cute boyfriend, and their friends (including the one who looks like Bakugo) have summer vacation fun with surprisingly little fanservice.

Written: FAIL.

Make sure your cat gets proper medical care!

I don’t have any cats. This should probably lead me to question my life choices.

Boss B is back from vacation. He has a dinosaur-patterned shirt, so is entitled to declare victory.

Played: Lancer. We had to escape from the self-unearthing menace, which was not that hard because even not counting the Sunzi that teleports and teleports and teleports (sometimes transitively, sometimes intransitively), we’re a really mobile team. Probably for the best that it didn’t take long, because Ken was feeling poorly.

Read: “MUGWUMP 4” (Robert Silverberg): An early example of human minds being exempt from time loops, which turns the comedy into horror.

Written: FAIL.

 

They’re an important source of protein for bats!

Finally managed to produce a medical sample and get it to UPS. Now I can stop worrying about getting it done and worry about the results!

UPS was so efficient that I did not have to wait for a next bus and was early to gaming, but that’s okay (I say as the person not hosting). It was a special gaming session, though, because after approximately 90745934 years, Chrisber has gaming with us again! Also he brought his offspring, Teo. Chrisber has a mustache now, and a lot of white in his hair, but he is still very much Chrisber. I don’t know Teo well yet, but he seems okay for a, you know, young person.

I didn’t have any brilliant ideas, and Dave’s idea did not garner sufficient support, so Jeremy is running D&D5 again (sigh). We are playing random university bozos who are about to be recruited into the Librarians Errant where we will track down dangerous, rare, or overdue books. My character is the result of an ethical experiment that turned her into a shadow magic sorcerer, so once again I am the only one without Charisma as a dump stat.

Written: FAIL. Apparently making up one (1) D&D character uses all my creativity for the day. I definitely blame capitalism for this.

Friends are good!

Finally found out enough about what was up with the office that I don’t feel entitled to more information, and also probably I won’t die tomorrow.

Played: Lancer. After our downtime, we went to check out some mysteries, and one of them turned out to be a robot army. I guess we’re about to find out whether we made the right choices when levelling up.

Written: FAIL.

The most blessed day of the year!

Our new office is not blessed, however, since in the middle of the day, everyone who was there got sent home and the office is closed for the rest of the week. No reason. I asked, but really, no reason. So that’s not worrying at all.

Played: Lancer. This session was all downtime, but we got to level up, and also we fixed our ship and made some kind of contact with one of the groups we’ve been fighting. Brooks’s character is probably going to get eaten by the rogue NHP lurking somewhere across the ocean.

Written: FAIL.

Remember when there was more than Google and Amazon and Facebook?

Went to get my teeths cleaned, found out that some fillings had escaped and need to be replaced.

Played: Lancer. Boss fight! We stopped the fiery berserker just before before its reactor exploded and also just before my mech melted into a puddle from all the burn loaded onto it. Not only do we level up, but there’s a promise of information next session.

Written: FAIL.

Played: Dark Matter. However, after leveling up to level 7, for all the good it did us, we finished the campaign! Space hamsters were saved from the Abyss, the guardians of the threshold were able to retire, etc. Not sure what we’re going to do now, but we have two whole weeks to think about it. Is everything I run terrible? Yes. Am I likely to end up running anyway? Probably.

Read: Karen From HR ch1-8 (Unpretty): Batman fanfic about an employee of WayneCorp, who has a hard and unusual life and then meets Bruce Wayne in person so things go sharply downhill. Kind of harrowing, but also Corinne is great for some extremely dark comedic value of “great”.

Written: 295 today, 1542/1000 for the week, 11089/10000 overall.

Not sure why World Population Day is less than nine months after International Kissing Day.

Early morning meeting for the CEO to tell us how we all have to suffer because the board set higher goals than Sales could reach. No layoffs this time, though, and probably my team’s hiring will not be affected.

In Minecraft, I built a hole to the bottom of the sea with the power of SAND, but it’s very slow and uses a lot of shovels, and even though the fjord out front of my great hall is allegedly a submerged ravine, I’m not finding much in the way of mineral wealth. Also I forgot to find and watch the Minecraft Musical.

Played: Lancer. I contributed nothing and also mistook a tree stump for a giant robot, so apparently I might as well have not bothered to show up. I should probably be writing on Tuesday nights anyway.

Written: FAIL, because I was wasting time gaming.