Tag: gaming

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.

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.