Tag: gaming

Played: Dark Matter, for the first time in a million years. We snuck into the Abyss until we got spotted, then we charged. The giant tentacle did not make our job any easier, but it didn’t make the demons’ job easier either, because Chaotic Evil Teamwork. Then we made it to the Infinite Bureaucracy Room, so we were able to take a long rest as long as somebody filled out some forms for the desk clerk to throw into the lake of fire every so often. Level UP! (Level 7 is not that great.)

Read: Angelina (Joel Shepherd): A teenager Italian wizard-slayer comes to NYC where the last two archmages are engaged in a cold war in search of terrible revenge, but everything is way more complicated and also there’s a boy and a nefarious plot and stuff. Looks bad for pretty much everybody by the end of the volume.

Written: 119 for the day, 611/1000 for the week, 8009/10000 overall.

Lots of meetings, including a long customer meeting that finally ended with getting them working again. That was satisfying, even if it was new boss R that found the important information.

I got Friday off, just in time for the Roseville trip to be cancelled due to illness. I think I would not have trained up on Friday and back on Sunday, because that is too much time on the train for time spent visiting friends.

Played: Lancer. No fight this time, which is probably for the best since Vivian had no internets and wouldn’t have been able to teleport and teleport and teleport. Instead we worked on fixing our spaceship and some other stuff that’s clearly not as important, and ended on the cliffhanger of the city being attacked. Time for a giant robot battle!

Played a little Minecraft, dug up some of the wooden parts of the sand mine, pillaged a couple of mine cart chests, and also dug up all the track I could find. Then I avoided the zombies and found a village, or maybe a dead village since it contained pillagers that shot me.

Written: FAIL. Gaming and getting ready for office tomorrow instead.

Played: Lancer. This time, our victory condition was to get to the far end of the map, past the annoying enemy mechs, and rescue the civilians. Alas, Vivian had to drop right at the beginning, so we weren’t able to cheese it with teleports, and it turned out to be a lot harder than last session, or at least a lot more painful. We didn’t even get to tick a clock!

Instead of going to bed, I searched Minecraft for blue flowers, but found only  caves full of coal and copper and DEATH.

Read: Komi Can’t Communicate vol 24 (Tomohito Oda): Well, now they’re an item, but they don’t seem to know what to do except be even more awkward. All the other characters are way too invested in the ship.

Read: Somebunny to Love (Zoe Chant): Latest of Kit’s “Virtue Shifter” novellas (?), in which a rabbit shifter finds her fated mate and bangs his brains out, and nothing even slightly bad happens at any point.

Written: FAIL.

My plan for beautiful floating dye gardens foundered on three reefs of hubris and poor design:

  • 2-height flowers don’t make more flowers when hit with bone meal, they just drop a copy of themselves. This is convenient, because it means I can convert bone meal directly to dye, but I only need one flower, not a garden.
  • Cactus can apparently only be planted on white sand? That’s weird, since it grows on red sand in the wild, but whatever. The problem here is that a block of cactus drops less than one cactus object on average, so I need to leave a stump to keep growing, but then I take damage trying to pick up the drops. Maybe I can do something with fences?
  • Most tragic of all, 1-height flowers don’t produce new flowers on regular dirt blocks, only grass blocks, which are almost impossible to get directly since you either need a shovel with a specific enchantment or have to mug an enderman who’s carrying one. However, grass does spread to adjacent blocks, so maybe making trails of dirt from existing grass to the gardens will populate them with

Played: Lancer. Since this is a module, we had a fancy map for our first mech fight, and special rules and victory conditions and everything! We also had about 3 license levels extra, so we triumphed OK even without Kelsey’s character on our side, and double reinforcements on the other.

Written: FAIL.

 

Played: Dark Matter. Getting to the dragon’s lair required the PCs to blow up a trash compactor full of gummy worms and fight robot duplicates of each other, but I was totally right about which surprisingly powerful NPC was really the dragon and of course they were on board with defeating the space mold kraken. Now we really have to break into the Abyss, rescue the mutated space hamsters, and finish the plot arc in triumph. After that, who knows what we’ll play.

I spent a lot more time playing Minecraft after that. Finally tried fishing, got some fish and a book of enchantments, built an orange terracotta causeway across to the spawn island with the big cave, dug down in the cave to find a bunch of coal and copper and a little island, finished up the side hall that opened into a cave and put up the rest of the hovering lights, got eaten by zmobies, hunted a squid for ink sacs to make black terracotta, the usual.

Written: Still FAIL. I can actually think about what happens next, at least a few paragraphs, but it never goes into a keyboard.

 

Managed to fix an upset customer, whose problem was not what they originally thought. Let’s hear it for the Knowledge Base!

Played: Now Ken is running Lancer, because somehow he still likes it. We’re using a module, which might be a bit weird because we’re three levels in and have our own spaceship, but I’m sure it will all work out. Somehow. Even though we’re stuck on a planet that’s full of replicant military hardware and/or monsters.

Written: FAIL.

Fortunately the time I had to get up today to attend early meetings was the same time I have to get up tomorrow to commute, so I’ll be awake and alert the rest of the week! Right?

Played: Lancer. NO giant robot fights this time, just discussion of the new age of blinkspace exploitation we have enabled. The End! Not sure what we’re playing next, but it will be without Dave, as he is no longer up for weeknight gaming.

Read: Blackwing (Ed McDonald): Dark fantasy in the shadow of two groups of immortal wizards fighting over the world and the magical devastation they leave behind. Or maybe it’s fantasy noir, since there’s corruption, betrayal, loyalty, mean streets, etc. Several named characters do survive until the end of the book, though!

Written: FAIL.

Played: Dark Matter. The conclusion of Death Race 800! Brina got to drive the wrong way around the track to play chicken and rescue the mysterious NPC who we now think might be a mutant red dragon in disguise, Bolt got to throw a bomb into the VIP seats, everyone got to crush the demons when they inevitably refused to accept a loss, level UP. Now we have one hour to get the dragon on-side before the chaos kraken eats everybody, no pressure.

Blblblbl.

Written: FAIL.

Played: Dark Matter. Turns out Death Race 800 isn’t just a race, we have to stop at three (or maybe more) points to engage in minigames. Being first to the field is definitely an advantage, though, so it’s not not a race. The first minigame was capture the flag, set in an industrial catwalk maze with no safety features whatsoever. There were unfortunately rules about what we could do to the other flags before the second and third teams arrived, but none of them said we couldn’t weld a cable to it one of them for yoinking or stick the other one on top of the flame vent. The cable didn’t work as well as I hoped, but it did slow down the other teams stealing the flag enough that we could get all three and open the exit lock. Also a couple of the larger demons got discorporated, which should make things easier going forward. Next session, we have to rescue one of the NPCs we like before she gets tattooed drunkenly.

I tried to foil the Chinese restaurant’s attempt to give me bonus soup by getting different soup as part of my order, so they gave me bonus fried rice instead.

Watched: Shadow & Bone 2. Yeah, yeah, chosen one, reluctant hero, whatever. When does she get to be a living laser cannon?

Read: Against All Odds (Jeffery H Haskell): Missiles in space, but way too much heroic Christian Americans-in-all-but-name who don’t trust this out-of-control technological innovation vs degenerate swarthy Muslims who only want to rape white women and also all media and civilian oversight of the military might as well be working for the enemy.

Written: Eventually it added up to 157 for the week, but at least I’m not that much of a MAGAt.

Yep, more customer meeting. Why will they not just fix the thing?

Only played a little Minecraft today. My farm is full of soggy zombies and I can’t figure out how to get water in a bucket.

Played: Lancer. We got through one round of combat because people were feeling under the weather. Without that, we might have made it to the middle of the second round.

Read: Assorted Entanglements vol 1 (Mikanuji): A 28-year-old office lady who thought she was straight and an 18-year old semi-delinquent somehow fall in love after a one-night stand and begin a life together despite their weird families and different personalities.

Read: “The Imperfection” (Mae Murray): Also queer, but mostly yikes.

Written: FAIL. I probably could have written some, but I have to get up and go to the office tomorrow.

Rachel is apparently feeling much better, so we had gaming.

Played: Dark Matter. We had a fight with a bunch of different poison AoEs in a confined space, but survived by letting the least-aggressive demons watch their movie in peace. In fact we even won, although our vampire buddy might have been permanently corrupted by cinematic torture. He was very grateful and gave us paper to use for books to try to bribe the dragon with. (The paper we made from the evil mushrooms was also evil.) But then it was revealed that one of the four Maguffins was with the Mad Max faction and the demons knew, so after getting healed of the demonic afflictions, we headed over there and arrived just in time to enter the race.

Written: 235.

I did not eat delicious pie today. I did some work, though. Customers, manne.

Played: Lancer. We almost didn’t play because of power outages, but PG&E came through for Dave. Ken was busy packing for a business trip, so next week he will be very surprised at where Tinca could not talk the PCs out of ending up.

Read: The Grief of Stones (Katherine Addison): Second of the spin-off from The Goblin Emperor about the detective-priest who gets mixed up in the most appalling schemes. This time: the depravity of photographs!

Written: Continued FAIL.

New boss definitely likes to talk a lot more in meetings than old boss.

Played: Lancer. I think we got through three whole rounds of combat this time.

Read: Beauty and the Besharam (Lillie Vale): An Indian-American girl who absolutely refuses to shut up, downplay her talents, or otherwise be modest, and her childhood friend/rival have extremely intense feelings over the summer between junior and senior year.

Read: Lazy Dragon Queen vol 6 (Ace Arriande): Even more ridiculous and somewhat lewd, to make up for the strange inclusions of seriousness.

Written: FAIL.

I seem to be much less sick today, so I went to gaming. I did not die from walking, so that’s good. I guess. I did have a fright when it seemed my phone had died a week after my pad died, but actually it just somehow to glitched to the lowest brightness setting, and when I got somewhere without direct sunlight I was able to set it back.

Played: Dark Matter. Nobody was very focused, so all we did was planning for a ridiculous quest that we got in exchange for Jaseen’s body not falling off. Ridiculous like “ahahahahaha you fools are actually going to try that?!”. It’ll be great. Maybe Jus will join us, although she might have to play Ninja Goat.

Read: Katalepsis ch 11.1-14, ch 12.1-6 (Hungry): They just can’t get away from those guys, even in [SPOILER], although maybe they can drive a wedge between them. I dunno, maybe trying to obliquely summarize each  chapter is pointless, I should just say I still really like it.

Written: FAIL. Energy flagging.

Happy Discount Candy Eve to all who celebrate!

Played: Lancer. Finally we finished escaping the Cave of Infinite Robots, but Droid’s mech got completely trashed. It was a little embarrassing, but there were a lot of enemies, so whatever. Sadly, we probably cannot steal the printers that made the infinite robots and will have to follow the leads we got to the next stage of the adventure.

Read: Victory’s Bright Dawn (Eric Thomson): Fourth book in the series, main character has gotten upgraded to a larger and less rules-oriented ship, but humans are still the problem.

Read: Katalepsis ch 6.1-9 (Hungry): More friends does mean more problems, yes, but MC is taking a few steps in the direction of her end goal.

Written: FAIL.

 

Played: Lancer. Finally a fight that isn’t just last-mech-standing! We made it all the way to back of the battlefield before the security system started launching robots at us, and had to keep them off Abrakyl while she rifled the suspicious database, and now we have to escape with her findings. It would probably be working better if I had retreated instead of charging into the stream.

Written: FAIL.

Played: Dark Matter. We’re just trying to walk a couple of miles to take a long rest at the Lawful Good faction’s clubhouse, and so far we’ve had two fights with demons and teamed up with one group of barnyard animals from the Abyss who all have musical numbers. The players got banana bread and singing GMs instead of singing goats in berets.

Read: The Agartha Loop first ed ch 2.1-2.15 (RavensDagger): Apparently this is a discontinued version and there’s a new edition! I guess I’ll go read that.

Written: 235 words.

Quarterly review at work. Apparently we have a new system, where when you do the things, you get the points, and if you have enough points at the end of the quarter, you don’t have to go into the crocodile pit. Also I managed to confess that kubernetes is not doing it for me, so somebody more compatible will be given all the cases.

Played: Lancer. I was able to contribute a lot more to the fight once I stop not contributing, and of course we won without being hardly at all destroyed. But all the printers are offline, so we can’t repair much before being sent off to find out who invaded the university and explain the error of their ways.

Written: FAIL.

So many meetings, starting actually before sunrise. Ugh. Ugh. Ugh.

Played: Lancer. Back at base and doing downtime activities after the last mission, the PCs are suddenly assaulted by random mechs! Or at least the university (“university” to Abrakyl and Shoutao, who mock their excessive use of IRBs) is assaulted and the PCs are the only ones with mechs handy. I tried to do the teamwork thing of staying by the defender mech that can protect me with its memes, but this seems to be a losing proposition without ranged attacks.

Read: Rodeo Clown chapter 11 (Marith): At long last, the climactic battle between evil and other, more shippable, evil!

Written: FAIL.

Back to work. At least Friday is closer than it may appear in mirror.

Played: Lancer. We finished the battle against the migrating radioactive robots, and then handwaved the many fights we were going to have to have against all the other people in the Triangle before we could persuade them that downloading illegal technology from the omninet is a bad idea even if you’re then going to take it to an unaligned world before experimenting with it. Level UP.

Written: FAIL.

Power went out at 2 this morning, and didn’t come back until after 15, so I spent a lot of the day wandering around trying to find a place to work from. All the coffee shops were full of WFHers, so I ended up in the Campbell Express Library, but it is teeny and had only a chair, no power. When I ran out of battery, I got lunch and then went to the nice big coffee shop in downtown Campbell, which by that time did have some room and some power outlets, and also coworker S from my previous job! It was very surprising and also nice to see her.

I was afraid the power was going to be out for ages, because the outage page never gave an ETA, but it was because they couldn’t be arsed to tell us, not because they didn’t know, and suddenly I got the notification that power was restored so I trundled home to sit with my electricity and my hydration and my computer.

For whatever reason, I did not sleep well without power (lack of fan noise?) but I was still somewhat productive.

Played: Lancer. Once again, downloading supertech off the space internet turns out to be a bad idea (except when Abrakyl does it, obviously), and we had to chase down the parts of somebody’s base, which had turned into a swarm of weird little robots and wandered off. They were extremely annoying little robots, so we’re looking forward to next week when Tinca will be there with her area-effect missiles.

Written: FAIL, only gaming.

I went outside, twice, and never got rained on. Go me!

Played: Dark Matter. We finally discovered the mysterious secret at the heart of the asteroid (it’s a hellaspud), but then we talked our way out of getting our memories wiped and/or being spaced, so I guess the campaign will continue. The librarian turned out to be an actual fiend, much to Sesamina’s dismay.

Written: 229 words.

Company is open for business as usual, so we all had to be there at the usual time, and the customers were there too. Not in force, at least, and the early Tuesday meeting seems to have been dropped for now. We have two new coworkers who will be doing a specialized thing, but I don’t know whether they’re cool yet.

Read: Stray Cat Strut ch 1.27-77, 2.1-8 (RavensDagger): Our heroine not only survived but was reunited with her girlfriend and family, and then got a quest from a fellow participant in the alien points scheme.

Played: Lancer. Finished the fight fairly quickly, found out unregulated NHPs were involved (which made Abrakyl and Early happy), then found out some people are onto other people, which might be us or might be somebody else. But the people we defeated let us use their printer to fix up our mechs, so that’s all good.

Written: FAIL.

Don’t want to work. Want to sleep. But sleep pays so poorly.

Played: Lancer. As usual, we ended in the middle of a fight, but it’s pretty close to over. Then we get to start grilling the other team to see if their story matches. Dave mentioned a twist, but I bet that will be on the third data point we try to gather.

Written: FAIL. It’s not like I even went to bed early after gaming, I just suck.

Played: Dark Matter. We fought our way through the decoy treasure room full of exploding robot spiders and other fun stuff, discovered the hidden drive component (2/4), and then found the real treasure room which was full of the books we were looking for and also ANCIENT DRAGON!!! We beat feet back to the librarian to let her know we had found the books, but although Sesamina was rooting for her, she did not seem to have enough Hit Dice to do anything about it at this time. We do get to level up to 4th level, though.

Read: “The Garden” (Tomi Champion-Adeyemi): Part verse, part prose, all literary, only arguably spec-fic.

Written: 223 kitten words.

Today’s early-morning meeting was cancelled, but I didn’t realize until I was already awake, so I spent the extra hour being useless instead of really sleeping. (But do I ever really sleep? Signs point to no.)

Played: Lancer. Vivian wasn’t able to make it, so we let Ken play TWO mechs since it’s his game after all. That’s probably why we trounced the all-flying team despite none of us being able to fly for more than a couple of rounds. Tinca was appalled that everyone else went,  “secret offworlder underground mech fight ring, okay, seems legit”.

Read: “Touching Divinity” (Benjamin Medrano): It has more than one scene, so I guess it’s technically not a vignette, but it’s very short and pretty much only one thing happens. It is gay, though.

Written: 226 kitten words.

Back to work! If only taking a vacation made me more instead of less energetic…

Played: Lancer. How does this game work again? And why do our enemies(?) have a fake beach set up in an underground bunker along with a wrestling announcer and a bird-themed mech squad?

Read: Talyn: Descent (Benjamin Medrano): Further adventures of a gay LitRPG succubus, featuring an incredibly nerve-wracking of leveling way up as well as the resolution of the mysterious problem. Third book not out until late next year, though.

Written: 383 kitten words, and I’m caught up through November 29, but just barely.