Tag: leverage

Are there even sysadmins any more? It’s all Site Ops or Dev Ops or whatever now, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but definitely makes me feel old.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage 5.10-11: The one with Sophie and the painting and Nate and Sterling while everyone else is in the previous episode, and the one with the big-box store and Elliott’s backstory.

Read (manga): Bloom Into You vol 2-3 (Nakatani Nio): The one who’s in love is getting more in love, the one who thinks she’s aro (not in those terms) has various feelings, there’s kissing anyway, school life happens, there’s a tragic backstory, etc.

Read (novel): All Roads Lead to the Phoenix Princess: Rebirth as a Wind Cultivator (Erios909): Reincarnation cultivation isekai, in the world of a MMORPG but without any game mechanics. Our protagonist does a lot of murders (arguably justified), uses OP game knowledge, attracts the attention of powerful people due to her unusual nature, starts accumulating a harem despite not showing interest in anyone, levels up repeatedly, all the usual isekai protagonist  stuff. There are obviously intended to be many more books, since there’s five years to save the world from the disaster that sets up the game world, but it’s self-published on Kindle Unlimited, so knows?

Written (game design): 438:

Now that we’ve reduced saves down to a single Save (shades of Perils
& Princesses!), back to HP. Losing HP is some amorphous combination
of fatigue, luck running out, and minor injuries (or other effects)
that don’t add up to a wound. It recovers quickly compared to wounds,
but how quickly? After a good night’s sleep? After a lunch break? After
a few minutes of rest?

It may be ridiculous, but I like the idea of rolling HP each time. The
meanest way of doing that would be to roll when the fight (or whatever
excitement goes against HP, like a trap) starts, but that might be too
much. Maybe roll at a reduced die size if you haven’t had a full night’s
sleep or lunch break? If you roll really badly, you can always take
another rest and reroll. Either take the higher of the roll and current
HP, or keep rerolling until you get a higher number. The latter
encourages people to keep resting until they get a really good result,
but wandering monster rolls and resource limits would keep that in
check.

Rolling HP each round is awfully appealing, though. Obviously with
this option the dice would be smaller than with the result of one
roll having to last a whole combat. It would be another roll each round
along with initiative though, unless we combined them somehow. When
we’re going from low to high initiative, are we actually just going from
low to high HP, giving it an element of battlefield awareness? I like
that, let’s try that.

The range of dice for HP depends on the range of dice for attacks, which
I imagine as being d4 to d10 to start with, like Dungeon World.
Increasing the die size, and getting more dice so you can beat up more
people at once, would be power-ups or advancements or whatever we’re
calling them. Getting more dice of HP would also be an advancement; not
sure about increasing the size of them. Or maybe they don’t all have to
be the same size; if you have 3d6 and to buy a d10, sure, go for it.

I’m okay with armor being a penalty on (appropriate) wound dice, but
what about shields? Extra HP is obvious, but then you also get extra
initiative. Is that too weird? Probably. Maybe a shield is a fixed
amount and only rolled HP count as initiative. And need a new name.

Double miss.

Stayed home, did some work, listened to some twitch streamers playing Minecraft, ate a salad.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage 5.9: The one where the OT3 foil a terrorist attack. I guess we weren’t as cynical about blowing off the law in the interest of alleged national security in 2012.

Read (manga): She Loves To Cook, and She Loves To Eat vol 5 (Sakaomi Yuzaki): They are still cooking and eating, but also moving in together (despite renting an apartment in Japan apparently being super-obnoxious) and even hugging! Also their friend with the eating disorder finally talked to a professional about it. Go them!

Written (game design): 423:

The problem with reading OSR blogs is then I start wondering if
dungeon-crawling might be fun, actually, and whether resource
constraints and inventory limits might make it more interesting.

D&D doesn’t seem to have dungeon crawling any more, just travel
montages between the set-piece level-appropriate encounters, and
for the most part, the only resources are character abilities (since
of course if you were able to buy resources that meant anything in
combat, you’d be OP for your level). There isn’t even a need to
worry about light, since almost everyone has darkvision and almost
anybody can get infinite light cantrips. Encumbrance is so fiddly that
it usually just gets ignored, too. This is why I want darkvision to not
be on the list of options for PCs, and also slot-based inventory (and
not just because inventory slots can get filled with wounds and fatigue
and maybe curses).

What do we expect PCs to do? (Obviously players can do anything
they want.) I like the idea that being able to spend MP also causes
trouble, the more trouble the more adepts you have and the longer
they stay in one place, so PCs either wander or are based out of a
temple/dojo/fortress that’s warded or remote or both. But what do
they do as they wander around? Or more specifically, since this is
heroic adventure fantasy, what kind of threats do they fight? People
who turned into monsters? 13th Age-style living dungeons and the
things that come out of them? Heretics with wrong magic? Celestials
shirking their afterlife duties in the mortal world? Inexplicable
walking dead? Pre-apocalyptic magic that has curdled over the ages
and now does something only vaguely like supporting a highly-advanced
civilization? Alien invaders? Your mom?

Actually all of those sound fun, alone or in combination. (Renegade
angels from outer space! Heretics worshiping an ancient city spirit so
it builds an ever-growing temple! A PC’s relative who has been consumed
by evil deeds and become a manticore!) Not all of them can be fought
directly, but that’s fine. At least some of them involving going into
sketchy confined areas where the inhabitants hate you, so that’s also
fine.

🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂

Went to the office, train was delayed, did some work, ate some Impossible sausage, along with improbable mashed potatoes and entirely plausible sauerkraut.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage 5.8: The one where Parker is on her own and down a limb, but solves the problem anyway because she’s the best.

Read (manga): Ogami-San Can’t Keep It In vol 7 (Yu Yoshidamaru): They made it! Not without more worries, but they get all the way to an epilogue where Ogami says she wants more sex.

Read (manga): The Tiger Won’t Eat The Dragon Yet vol 3 (Hachi Inaba): Tiger and Dragon continue the quest for reduced mortality and encounter various beasts, including the ones they really didn’t want to meet again. Also a cut to Boy Tiger and the cheetah cub he adopted. This manga is kind of nerve-wracking, since I don’t care if humans get eaten by hyenas, but would be very upset if Baby Cheetah did, and they still might.

Read (short): “An Easy Mistake” (Glynn Stewart): Vignette to draw people to the newsletter, as is apparently the custom in our social-media-blighted dystopia of 2025.

Written (game design): 336:

I was thinking about how I want to have black powder guns and
grenades as non-magical counterparts to the big-damage limited-use
spells, but what even is “non-magical”? D&D has a fake-historical
setting with “magic” stapled on top, but it’s a distinct thing,
which leads to spells of detect magic and dispel magic, and even a
god of magic, when it’s the gods themselves that should be magic.
(We continue to reject the false dichotomy of divine vs arcane
magic!)

But is magic invoking the gods, or powers bestowed by the gods?
Maybe secret knowledge granted by the gods? Performed by servitors sent
by the gods? Are there even gods? Earlier I talked about MP being
attunement to the flow of the cosmos, and maybe that’s all there is; the
“gods” are just humans putting faces on different parts of it? Not that
means they aren’t real.

Not sure where I’m going with this. (I say that a lot, don’t I?)
We already knew all of D&D magic can be tossed out, but this isn’t
getting us closer to knowing what to replace it with. If we do have
guns and bombs, then magicians don’t have to be literal artillery
and can fill some other roles.

One thing I like from some OSR games is the “cleric” being the prophet
of some weird little god. There can be also be priests of big important
gods with temples and vestments and established rites, but the prophet
is directly connected to something that is highly specialized and not
even slightly good at dealing with human stuff. The quote I remember is,
“Whoops, you didn’t want to give birth to a thousand live snakes through
your mouth? Sorry, it was an honest mistake!” This is somewhere between
magic-by-invoking-the-gods and magic-powers-granted-by-the-gods, but
presumably part of being an early prophet is establishing the rites so
the later priests can have magic-spells-revealed-by-the-gods or
whatever.

Also, maybe I want black powder lasers. The equipment list is fair game
for worldbuilding!

Apparently I’m not British enough.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage 5.7: The one with the car guy and the Mafia guy.

Read (manga): FAILED. Because I suck.

Read (novel): The Lies Arcana (Glynn Stewart): Seventeenth or so in the missiles-in-space-with-magic series, following the diplomat we picked up in the last couple of books and the spy ship captain from a while back. Despite the massive undertaking from last book, there is a whole lot that needs to be done, and also some secrets revealed both in and out of character.

Written (game design): 274:

If HP is Hit Protection, is MP Magic Protection? Conjuring up a
lightning bolt to throw at someone probably goes against their HP,
since you’re trying to hit them with something, but trying to put
a curse on them, or otherwise targeting them as a person, could go
against MP. Is using the same stat for defense and fuel bad? On the
one hand, it would cut down on the numbers on a character sheet (or
the associated postit note for numbers that change a lot), but on
the other hand, it would be a weird dynamic in combat. I’m not sure
spending HP for martial abilities is correct when it’s defense and
not health, or ever, so there could be an annoying inconsistency,
but I’m not sure it’s not, so ugh.

An alternate flavor for MP could be synchronization with the flow of the
cosmos, which gets disrupted when you push on the cosmos to do magic.
The hit from overspending might be more wild magic-flavored than soul
damage-flavored, but otherwise the implementation would be about the same,
just less metal.

Another difference between HP and MP would be that HP can be recovered
in combat, or at least pretty immediately outside of combat, since
it’s “just” energy and alertness. I’m not sure how fast MP should
recover, though. Maybe it’s okay to also recover quickly? It depends
on how much you can do with a spell, I guess, that determines how
powerful being able to cast spells all day is. What does “powerful” even
mean when there’s more to life than level-appropriate encounters?

Fuck yeah, Wobblies!

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage 5.6: The one with the 70s flashbacks and the twist.

Read (manga):I Wanna Do Bad Things With You vol 4-5 (Yutaka):The overnight study session episode, which veers more into standard rom-com with accidental contact, unintentionally hot borrowed clothes, jealous fiancees, etc, but then back to doing bad things and fraternal conflict for a bit before the summer festival yukata episode.

Read (novel): A Broken Darkness (Premee Mohamed): Our viewpoint character has not really moved on from his feelings at the end of Beneath the Rising, but that’s too bad for him because the world is in danger again, or maybe still, and the person he hates still has some claim to being the only person who can fix it.

Written (game design): 245:

Something the OSR talks about is “tactical infinity”, the idea that you
can use actual tactics (ie, cheating) and have it be effective. D&D
gives lip service to this, but clever tactics can’t actually be more
effective than the abilities granted by your class levels, or you’re off
the power curve and the level-appropriate encounters aren’t appropriate
any more. This isn’t so much of a problem in a home game, but D&D as a
branding entity wants to have a consistent experience across the
published adventures, Living Whatsit sessions, etc, so no incentive to
encourage going off-label.

By the same token, opponents are limited, not just individually to the
actions on their character sheet, but globally to some set of mechanics.
If the GM sets up a battle against ghosts that are immune to physical
damage, that’s not cricket because then everybody’s attacks they got
from their level don’t help and the calibration is off. However, if we
yeet the idea of level-appropriate encounters and having to fight
everything in set-piece battles with only what’s on your character
sheet, it’s fine. If you can’t beat up the ghosts, you can go around them
or come back later with exorcism incense or buy them off with cow blood
or just not go that way, there’s probably nothing interesting over there
anyway.

Hopefully includes air conditioning for our friends on the East Coast!

Went to the office, the train worked out okay going but I need to change it up on the way back, ate some meat and veggies and rice and tea egg, did some work, told other people how to do work.

Watched (live-action TV): Murderbot 1.8: Uh oh, Murderbot has a plan. And yeah, I thought we hadn’t had the name reveal until now!

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage 5.5: The one with the cheerleaders and the federal government. It seems pretty obvious what Nate’s plan is, but we don’t know his motivation yet and there’s probably a twist.

Read (manga): Murciélago vol 7 (Yoshimurakana): The unwholesomeness from last volume is still going on in the background, but now Kuroko has an entire terrorist organization to murder, so that should keep her occupied for a bit.

Read (manga): I Wanna Do Bad Things With You vol 3 (Yutaka): Oh no, someone else has noticed that our heroine is smoking hot and apparently also bi!

Written (game design): 320:

Leaving the primary spell-casting classes aside for the moment, what
other combined classes do we need, if we need classes? Fighter,
barbarian, and ranger are basically the same, they just have different
combat feats/fighting styles. (D&D rangers have spells, but I think
that’s just shoehorned in because as previously mentioned, everything is
spells. Two-weapon fighting and animal companion are more central to the
class.) Paladin and monk are more magical, but again, it doesn’t have to be
spells. Innate powers seem just as fitting, and possibly there’s not a
difference between those and advanced combat feats. Again, I’m okay with
nobody being able to claim punching through a brick wall isn’t magic.

There’s a school of thought that holds that D&D jumped the shark
when thieves were introduced. Suddenly, there’s a class that has
Climb Walls, Read Scrolls, and Backstab on its sheet, which means
all the other classes don’t. 3rd ed somewhat reversed that by
making most of those things skills that any character can have, but
the idea that you can do what’s on your character sheet and can’t
do things that aren’t was pretty firmly embedded.

The major thief ability that didn’t get turned into a skill is Backstab,
which has also gotten progressively genericized until now it has nothing
to do with stealth or surprise or distraction, and just gives a damage
bonus if the thief has a buddy nearby. This is as lame as calling them
“rogues”. It’s not that great to make only one class able to get an
advantage from ambushing people, though. Stabbing your enemies in the
back is a basic tactic, not a superpower. So, thieves are part of the
fighter superclass, differentiated only by the feats they take.

That’s another thing we need a list of, or several lists, or a tree or
something.

Insert mockery of the current regime here.

Missed my train stop but still made it in to the office, Coworker D is on vacation, ate some popcorn chicken, had my first 1:1 with Boss T.

Watched (live action TV): Leverage 5.3-4: The one where Nate doesn’t listen, and the one where Eliot helps Parker have an emotion.

Read (manga): Murciélago vol 1 (Yoshimurakana): A mass-murdering lesbian horndog kills criminals the police can’t handle in a city named R’lyeh. It’s over-the-top action-horror, not cosmic horror despite the Lovecraftian words scattered around, and all the monsters are nominally human, but it’s not surprising SAN is in generally short supply. Very unwholesome, zero redeeming social value.

Read (novel): Shroud (Adrian Tchaikovsky): It’s not a Hal Clement novel, but probably as close as we get in 2025. Two unfortunate explorers from a von Neumann corporate dystopia are stranded on a world that’s a cross between Venus and Titan and have to trek across the alien terrain full of alien creatures to get off. It’s more xenobiology and xenopsychology than chemistry and physics, though.

Written (catgirl): 198. Oh, that’s what was behind that door.

Check! Also International Creativity Day, which, maybe not.

I did not get much work done because Sage wanted to sleep on my all day, but then exactly at quitting time another department completely screwed up a shared resource and I had to spend an hour and some helping get things recombobulated.

Watched (live-action TV): Murderbot 1.4: I’m glad we got the line about Dr. Mensah being an intrepid galactic explorer, but we didn’t need the idiot or the spurious countdown.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage 5.2: The one with the hockey. I think they formed an autonomous workers’ collective at the end, which is always good.

Read (manga): The Whole of Humanity Has Gone Yuri Except For Me (Hiroki Haruse): One morning, a high-school girl wakes up in a world that has had only women for a hundred years. This is not just a setup; figuring out what happened and what the main characters feel about it is the plot. The art could be better, but there are girl-smooches. Complete in one double-sized omnibus.

Read (novella): All Systems Red (Martha Wells): The TV show is all well and good, but I felt a need to reread the books, and yep, they’re better. Because Murderbot is the best, and the non-goofy Preservation researchers are also the best.

Read (novella): Artificial Condition (Martha Wells): ART is also the best.

Read (novella): Rogue Protocol (Martha Wells): I guess Miki could have been the best, but… CombatBots are definitely the worst.

Written (catgirl): 301.

A pink flamingo is a well-fed flamingo full of brine shrimp!

Also End of the Middle Ages Day, which is apropos since I was thinking about how D&D is not medieval. (It’s mostly Renaissance, with some Wild West and Post-Apocalyptic thrown in.)

Went to the office, ate German food with vat-grown sausage, did some work.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage 5.1: New lair, and Nate is up to something that’s probably self-destructive. The one with the airplane.

Read (novel): Advocate (Daniel M Ford): Frontier town necromancer-sheriff has to go back to civilization to help defend her mentor against trumped-up charges, which lets her use her noble background but also involves a lot of annoying politics.

Written (catgirl): 299.

And yet I did not play Perils & Princesses!

I did go to the farmer’s market, check on Ayse & fam’s cats, and eat fresh veggies and cheese with Marith.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage 1.1: Rewatched to see who the recurring character at the end of season 4 was. Oh, that guy. Yeah, fuck him. Also, Parker was a lot sexier in the premier. Not intrinsically, but she had more sexy scenes.

Written (catgirl): 191.

Turtles are good.

I am on vacation, because I didn’t retract my request for days off even though I am not worthy to go to Roseville.

Slept in until forever because I stayed up too late reading last night, then took some books to the used book store. They didn’t keep as much this time, but on the other hand I was finally able to move a bunch of stuff from the couch onto shelves. Not sure those couch shelves will ever recover, though.

Watched (live-action TV): Murderbot 3: Not a lot happened in this episode, or at least it didn’t have an arc. Not sure what Gurathin’s deal is, but I don’t think he’s just being pointlessly creepy.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage 4.17-18: Season finale! The one with Nate’s dad and the patent office and the return of the guy from before (who sucks). I thought this was the end of the original series and was bummed that there was no OT3, but actually there’s a whole season yet.

Read (manga): Sachi’s Monstrous Appetite vol 1-2 (Chomoran): Middle-school boy discovers that the high-school girl next store he has a crush on is actually a giant whale(?) monster and he smells delicious to monsters. Together, they fight crime keep the local monster population under control and have feelings.

Written (catgirl): 271.

Hi Ken!

Went to the office, some coworkers were there, ate samosas and saved my chicken biriyani for later, tried to straighten things up for vacation.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage 4.15-16: the one where they help a rich guy, and the one where Hardison tries to be the mastermind. Only two episodes left in the season, so the guy who shows up at the end is probably going to be important for the finale.

Read (RPG): Under Hollow Hills (Meguey Baker, Vincent Baker): You are a fairy circus that travels around performing and getting involved in fairy shenanigans. Pretty much the opposite of Apocalypse World tonally, yet still very PbtA. Shifting toward Summer or Winter, planning shows, ensuring there’s always someone who doesn’t want you there, attending your own funeral, all the important fairy tropes are covered, in a way that’s generic enough to let players come up with their own ideas of fairy but evocative enough to always be Fairy.

Read (novel): The Devils (Joe Abercrombie): In an alternate Europe full of anthropophagous elves, murder, religious schisms, murder, various forms of holy and unholy sorcery, murder, etc, an extremely hapless monk is given command of a band of monstrous criminals and sent to deliver the lost princess of Troy to her throne. It’s Abercrombie, so it’s the darkest and murderiest of comedy, but surprisingly for alternate-historical grimness, I don’t think there’s any sexual violence. Stayed up way too late finishing it.

Written (catgirl): 171.

One of two, and that’s not counting Velociraptor Awareness Day.

Went to the office, spaced out during a long all-hands meeting, ate some rice and vegetables and meat, put up with Coworker R being a libertarian and also engaging in the British national sport of complaining (I have no moral high ground here), closed some cases.

I complained on slack about being ditched for the journey to and from Roseville, so now everybody there can hate me too. They’re right that I could at least look for a taxi if I hate both gig economy and people doing things for me, though.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage 4.14: While the girls were out righting a wrong at a fancy party, the boys were getting into some kind of mobster trouble with an idiot.

Read (novel): Emberstone Farm vol 2 (L Meili): More OP-ness, world events that are alarming to people who think they live in reality, system usage that’s alarming to people who think they live in reality, extremely off-screen sex, nothing like an actual problem for the MC.

Read (manga): Assorted Entanglements vol 2 (Mikanuji): Apparently it’s been two years since I read volume 1, so I don’t remember if any of these are the same characters, but they’re all super gay and somewhat ridiculous anyway.

Written (catgirl): 202.

Because fuck Nazis, that’s why.

Went to the office, only Coworker T was there, ate a Thai(?) ground pork and rice thing, did some work.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage 4.13: Everyone attempts to have a night off, but Parker, Sophie, and Tara find a leverage job. As always, nobody can get anything done without Hardison, but the other boys are pretty useless.

Read (graphic novel): Fangirl vol 3 (Rainbow Rowell, Gabi Nam): Boy trouble, writing trouble, sister trouble, parent trouble.

Written (catgirl): 169.

All hail Emperor Maximilian XXIX of the Northern Shores!

But no parades for my digestive tract, which apparently was working up to being really gross and causing me to sit on the toilet in the middle of the night so I could faint onto the floor and break the litter box and scrape up my face and bang my tooth, and also sleep poorly. I stayed in bed until later in the morning, but eventually it seemed like I was enough of a hollow husk of a body to get up and log in to work. I accomplished several tasks, even.

Marith claimed the mysterious shoes, so that’s good.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage 4.12: That was a very silly episode. Maybe Nate should put more work into not being a jerk and less into speaking Football.

Read (anthology): Duties (Moe Lane): Another four-story collection, with a robot who won’t shut up about how gross meatbags are, a dryad, the secret base where the US government sends everything that you might naively assumed would go to the warehouse from Raiders of the Lost Ark, and a frog.

Read (manga): Avant-Garde Yumeko (Shuzo Oshimi): Yumeko doesn’t want to sleep with anybody, she just wants to know what dicks look like. Then it gets weird. Contains actual pictures of dicks, which I was really not expecting. So many dicks.

Written (catgirl): 119, still notes. I should probably stop futzing around and write something for real.

It is very important to be aware of velociraptors!

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage 4.11: Parker seems a little too into that role, although Hardison’s not complaining. Also, I’m not sure that’s a fight Nate should have picked for them, but on the other hand, fuck all those guys.

Read (manga): Nightfall Travellers vol 2 (Tomohi): More exploration of hills and shrines and other spooky places. Maybe it’s actually the other girl who will turn out to be a ghost?

Written (catgirl): 109 of notes.

I have some of those! Victory!

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage 4.9-10: The one where they have to save the day with only an airport as resources and the one where Sterling talks them into stealing a technobabble from a chess tournament.

Read (manga): Leviathan vol 1 (Shiro Kuroi): Scavengers investigate a derelict spaceship while reading the journal of one of the schoolkids who descended right into savagery when the ship was damaged.

Written (catgirl): 234 of worldbuilding notes.

Went to the office, ate a Mediterranean-salmon burrito thing, did some work.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage 4.8: Conning the Mako.

Read (manga): Go With the Clouds North-by-Northwest vol 1 (Aki Irie): A Japanese teenager in Iceland, using his secret psychometry powers to do detective work while his grandpa picks up on the ladies. Lots of Icelandic scenery, people who make the MC’s life difficult, family trouble. By the same mangaka as Ran and the Gray World.

Read (novel): The City That Would Eat the World (John Bierce): In a world where everything runs on the very specific blessings of myriad gods, a god appeared who slowed aging for members of the city watch as long as they were on the walls. A few centuries later, everyone is officially part of the guard and the entire city is walls (except the interstices where the underclass labor and age, but that’s not important) and doing its best to cover the whole world. A disillusioned citizen and an outsider whose home was destroyed by the city’s extractive industries and general capitalist shittiness get stuck taking a god to the West Pole through this bizarre world full of corrupt societies, and doing their best to not suck along the way. There’s a lot of exposition because it’s a very different world, and the main characters are unfortunately straight, but people resisting capitalism is always good.

Written (catgirl): 122.

D’oh, I completely forgot!

Randomly took the day off work, since I was owed a day from working on President Day. Meant to get up and listen in on Friday morning training anyway, but completely failed and ended up sleeping in until I felt bad about not feeding the cats. Then I was moving so I fed myself with Pakistani-Indian Fusion Cuisine, spicy chicken qorma and less-spicy samosas and butter garlic sesame-seed naan. It might have been sufficiently celebratory.

I could possibly have done something useful, but mostly I cleaned up browser tabs, quite a few of which were short stories I had been meaning to read. Watched some TV with Marith, who is sick as well as having no computer. Probably I didn’t catch her cold. I hope my computer didn’t catch anything either.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage 4.7: The one with shady funeral home family, where Parker has an honest-to-something feeling.

Read (manga): In/Spectre vol 19 (Kyo Shirodaira, Chashiba Katase): A bunch of one-chapter stories. Kuro tried to star in one, Rikka played a horrible prank, assorted yōkai caused trouble.

Read (short): “Victory Citrus is Sweet” (Thoraiya Dyer): A spacer who is actually kind of a jerk gets himself and his apprentice in trouble by cutting corners to show somebody up.

Read (short): “Welcome to the Medical Clinic at the Interplanetary Relay Station | Hours Since the Last Patient Death: 0” (Caroline M Yoachim): A future in which the current American medical system is still in place. Story in the form of a choose-your-own-adventure.

Read (short): “When the Yogurt Took Over: A Short Story” (John Scalzi): Definitely a different spin on the “enough computers together form a mind” trope.

Read (short): “Transcript of Interaction Between Astronaut Mike Scudderman and the OnStar Hands-Free A.I. Crash Advisor” (Grady Hendrix): Did you want your AI to be useful? Sorry, your timeline stems from the Trump-Musk presidency, you only get a chatbot.

Read (short): “Wikihistory” (Desmond Warzel): Everybody who gets access to time travel does it, then some long-suffering admin has to revert their changes.

Read (short): “In the Forests of Memory” (E Lily Yu): A sad story about an old lady in a cemetery of holographic grave markers, living off the offerings.

Read (short): “Presence” (Ken Liu): A sad story about an emigrant visiting his dying mother in the old country via telepresence.

Read (short): “The Thief of Memory” (Sunyi Dean): What is identity but memory? Also not a happy story, although you can’t blame a desparate teenager for making a rookie mistake.

Read (short): “The Dark House” (AC Wise): A haunted house, a haunted photographer, haunted photographs.

Written (game design): 136.

Does maniacal cackling count?

Went to the office, had the room to myself, ate a Mediterranean chicken burrito, did a little work. Probably didn’t hydrate enough.

Watched (live-action): Leverage 4.6: Elliot saves a small girl from a carnival.

Read (novel): Stars, Hide Your Fires (Jessica Best): A small-time crook from a crapsack world infiltrates an upper-crust ball to pick pockets, but although she meets a cute girl, the upper crust has problems of its own. Very Star Wars setting: blasters and spaceships, but social structures including security procedures are stuck in Three Musketeers era at best.

Read (manga): In/Spectre vol 17 (Kyo Shirodaira, Chashiba Katase): A different yuki-onna mystery, with extra historical sword school shenanigans.

Written (game design): 104.

Oddly, getting up at 7 isn’t any better the second time. It probably doesn’t help that DDP is one of the things I forgot to bring.

This session’s players were less energetic, and I was not up to making up for that, so less fun was had today than yesterday. I did not manage to keep everyone engaged, and also did not learn anything from yesterday’s experience. Plus I forgot how random DW combat is, so the wooden boar running roughshod over the party yesterday was no indicator of future performance. It was still better than not gaming, but not by as much as anyone would like.

Since my evening game started at 18:00, I decided to skip the 14-18 slot in favor of napping. This left me time to get dinner, but I ended up not bothering. I also perused the dealer’s corner, but I mostly don’t want physical books any more. Sorry, publishers of indie games!

The evening slot was Leverage, with the twist that we were helping people who had been screwed over by a corrupt superhero. Because right was on our side, we made pretty much every roll for the whole game, even against the security guard who had a d10 gut telling him something was hinky and the d12 superhero. I was playing the tiny thief, so I got to sneak into the bank data center through the HVAC ducts that no one could possibly fit through, and then later into the museum to get an old costume for the grifter to impersonate the superhero in front of his coconspirators. It was obviously not as smooth as real Leverage caper, but we had to do it in one pass with no revisions, so I think it turned out pretty well all things considered.

Despite my nap, I didn’t mind ending before the scheduled time of midnight.