I was stupid in the training meeting too.
Played: Nothing, but when Ken canceled at the last moment due to a family emergency, the rest of us tried making Lancer characters. Our group origin is a special ops team that ended up being lost after a light-speed jump caused them to miss the end of the war. We have an engineer, a weirdo who listens to NHPs, and a pilot.
Read: FAIL.
Words: FAIL.
I can get up on time when people expect me to be at the place to do the thing.
Played: Lancer. We defeated the Engineering Mutants and their pet abomination, by the simple expedient of barbecuing them all when they wouldn’t communicate, and some of the things that came through the malfunctioning Blinkgate. The other things we managed to delay in their incomprehensible purpose until we could unplug the console they were trying to use to reset the Blinkgate, and then get xenolinguists who have spent their entire careers waiting for this opportunity to talk to them. I’m sure there will be no consequences.
Watched: The Owl House 1-2. It was not what I was expecting, which I guess means I was expecting the wrong thing.
Read: Aposimz vol 3 (Tsutomu Nihei): Ugh, allies! Also, apparently there are no animals on this artificial world, only robots with edible parts. That’s very on-brand.
Words: 508 kitten words.
Double gaming weekend! There was some doubt, but Jeremy’s dad seems to be doing well so the Gollubs and their unending gaming food were available.
Played: Lancer. No combat this session, but we saved the world anyway. I think Kappa has to buy up her Charm trigger next level, since she did so much diplomacy this mission. Not that the mission is over yet, since Dave accepted our suggestion of mutants inhabiting the engineering spaces of the blink gate we need to repair. It was a pretty satisfying session.
Words: Only 294 words, but I finally implemented the fancier (kinda) calendar for kitten words, and made a link in Writing. Then I thought about revising and didn’t.
Played: Lancer. We got bonus licenses so we could put up an overwhelming show of force against some scrubs that thought they could mess with Unity, and it went really well for about three rounds (yay gravity cannon!) until we found that the enemy was also bait, and we all got sucked through blinkspace to an unknown planet that is having some kind of military conflict. Apparently we’re going to have to pick whichever side is most aligned with fully automated luxury queer space communism, or failing that, whichever side is most likely to be able to produce exotic matter, and use our mechs to assure their victory. Also, at the gaming table, I was thoroughly encroached upon by a dog.
Words: 432 kitten words. Does anyone care? Probably not.
Played: Lancer. After holidays and plague, we finally reconvened to continue showing the mad scientist in his cockroach lab that his abominations aren’t all that. Not even if they are being piloted by quick-grow clones of my characters. As a player, I like the Horus stuff, but I don’t have any trouble playing a character who is “thanks, I hate it” about every single thing we learned.
Read: My Dragon Girlfriend p1-525 (Fawnduu): Cute slice-of-life-with-secret-magical creatures. Simple art, extremely gay, no, gayer than that. (I think there is a total of one male character in the first 500 episodes, and he doesn’t last long). The pictures are not particularly risqué but those ladies are definitely making the cryptid with two backs in some scenes. So are those ladies.
Read: Admiral’s Oath (Glynn Stewart): Spin-off from another series that ends with the protagonists smashing the antagonists’ military-industrial complex, focusing on the fallout of that smashing and how honorable soldiers (in space, with missiles and also massive charge imbalances that should vaporize their ships) try to protect their nation.
Words: FAIL.
Played: Lancer. I mean, mostly we talked about kids these days and how the world is going to hell and made dreadful jokes, but also our characters found a crater and a crashed spaceship and a giant cockroach-base and a mad scientist. Rumble!
Read: Chamomile #1-243: 20-something retail slice of life, with only minor surreal elements (like brush-eating hair), very cute.
Read: Looking For Group (Alexis Hall): What if the hot elf girl in WoW Totally Fictional MMORPG turns out to be played by a guy, but you still kind of like him, and everything is great until you listen to your asshole friend too much and screw everything up? Not at all deep, but cute.
Words: 689, but I’m not sure they’re right.
Played: Lancer, finally, despite Dave getting boosted. We found the heart of the problem, extracted information from it, and then blew it up, despite the many exciting board elements trying to stop us. Go us! Next stop: a moon.
NaNoWriMo Words: 18730 + 1823 = 20553. Even with three or four days off for Thanksgiving, I can make it to the halfway point by the 30th.
Played: Lancer. We finally found the problem, and it is both non-Euclidean and hungry.
Read: Burn the Witch vol 1 (Tite Kubo): Young witches vs assorted magical entities in London and Reverse London. Apparently part of the Bleach universe, although we have not seen any Reapers or other Soul Society types.
Words: Check.
I only did one thing today, and the travel was much easier than in times past, but apparently that still used up my entire brain. I got hard-boiled eggs from Marith, though.
Played: Lancer. Leveling up worked a lot better with the other players. Apparently I’m support and spotter for the sniper, but also leader, and getting licenses for the SSC Swallowtail. New mission, which requires us to get out of our mechs (clutch pearls). No combat so far, but next session should be exciting.
Read: The Falling In Love Montage (Ciara Smyth): High school senior (equivalent) lesbians, genetic doom, “it’s just a summer fling”, family drama, surprisingly awesome stepparentage, rom-coms are a highly dubious guide to life.
Read: The Case Study of Vanitas vol 2 (Jun Mochizuki): Noé’s tragic history flashback and Vanitas’s tryst in the middle of the Masked Ball Attack.
Words: Check.
Moved some books onto the one bookcase I have managed to move into my bedroom. It is large enough to hold all the unread manga and comics I have so far unearthed, but I bet there’s more, and that’s not even counting the games. Also my apartment does not have any good place to sit and read, nor to sit and spread out new games.
I had run out of Diet Snapple, but once again BevMo saved me. They seem to be the only store that ever has it in stock, and even they acknowledged that it is hard to come by these days.
I was on call from 13:30 to 19:30, and there was no customer activity until the very minute before the next guy came on shift and it stopped being my problem. Good work, clock!
Marith asked where the page of previously watched anime was, and I realized I had not created it on the new site, so I did that. It was like being productive, right? Not sure what to do with the reading list, though. I’m sure I could figure out how to create a fixed-width document and important it as-is, but should I be doing something better? Should I even bother? Is there any point to anything on the Internet?
Played: Nothing! Jus is back from vacation, but Marith is dead, so no Zoomwarts. Since there’s now only a week until the next Lancer session, I went through the book for a couple of hours, but there are so many options, and it’s so unclear which, if any, could be the right one. Blugh.
Read: Blood of the Chosen (Django Wexler): Second in the series I think of as “fantasy Star Wars” because knights with energy swords uphold civilization and the elite army wear faceless white armor, carry blasters, and get mown down by the PCs. The siblings divided between the two factions which have been blaming each other for the collapse of the golden age centuries ago just found the next boss and are obviously going to have to work together in the next book despite all their allies thinking each other are anathema.
Read: Komi Can’t Communicate vol 15 (Tomohito Oda): Komi makes another friend during the student president election, a bunch of her and her brother’s friends get exposed to her mother, and [SPOILER] finally acknowledges her crush on [SPOILER].
Words: Check. I need grit my teeth and just make a very plain blog site by hand to publish stuff, I guess.
Played: Lancer. Since we missed last session, we had to have twice the usual amount of non-gaming socialization, including complaining about Kids These Days, but there was time for some skill challenges and a fight against an overwhelming opponent. Kappa lasted slightly longer against them than the other two, and with a couple of better rolls could have forced the opponent to make a roll that could have taken them out if they rolled badly enough, so I claim a moral victory. The PCs had already won by that point, though, so defeating the final boss was just for style points. Now we get to level up and pick mecha to work toward while Dave tries to come up with another adventure.
Read: Hitomi-chan is Shy With Strangers vol 1 (Chorisuke Natsumi): The scary-faced-looming-guy-who’s-secretly-nice trope, but this time it’s a busty high-school girl, and the friend who understands her niceness is her head-shorter sempai.
Words: Check.
Played: Lancer. This time we had two combats, one against opponents with special powers that went about how it did in Dave’s simulation runs, and then one against a bunch of mooks that went really quickly because a) we all used our daily power, b) they couldn’t roll for beans, and c) we almost never missed. It was still pretty rough, I think the PCs took an average of at least 1 structure damage each, but now they are in control of the printer and can get a full repair. Apparently we are having enough fun that we will force Dave to come up with a second adventure.
Read: Devil’s Candy archives (Rem, Bikkuri): Up through the beginning of chapter 14. I really like this comic, it has a very TFOS vibe.
Words: Check, I guess, kinda.
Played: Lancer. This time we actually played! Skill rolls were made, dissent among the less-enlightened polity was exploited, and mechs slugged it out in the gravityless, low-pressure tunnels of a military base that should have been abandoned. Interrogating the prisoners from that got us information that fulfills our basic mission goal, but there’s a lot more slugging that needs to be done. Like every version of D&D, Lancer invents new terminology for the same concepts and randomly changes things around, but it’s still turn-based tactical combat on a grid. I didn’t find it as annoying as Gloomhaven, at least?
Words: Check.
Played: Lancer. Or at least we made characters and mechs, which I think is more complicated than it needs to be. Also we needed either more or less caffeine. Anyway, next fortnight, we can try doing something and then I can hate the system a lot. Binary outcomes, boo.
Words: check.
I was on call all day, so I couldn’t do things like ride the bus to go shopping or visit Ayse and Ken (I mean, technically I could, I have a phone, but it would be superannoying to get called while on the bus). I guess it builds character? That would explain why I managed to make a Lancer character. I couldn’t find a good picture on Pinterest, though. My ability to find things on the Internets is not very great.
Played: Zoomwarts, with actual Zoom. There was lots of drama, but Bella still doesn’t have a date for the party, because she missed her chance! Well, maybe she can convince a boy who already has a date to dump her in favor of Bella.
Words: Check.