No Summit activities today (everyone is flying or touristing or whatever), which is good because I have no braincells left.
Watched (live-action TV): The Librarians 2.3: Hey, look, it’s Stone’s backstory! Also, an extremely annoying monster of the week.
Written (Geometry for Mutants): 390.
Also Perfect Sour Candy Day.
As always, I slept in too much and went shopping, but did not go to anime because Dave is sick.
Watched (live-action TV): The Librarians 2.2: The new villain invades the Library in search of a magical upgrade, but Flynn is still master of the Library. Also Baird made some kind of deal with the minion, because there is exploitable tension there, but we’re not sure exactly what it was.
Read (short): The Price of Meat (KJ Charles): In the middle of alt-C19 London, there is a region where the law does not apply, and the worst of the worst take refuge to plot their criminal plots. Our Heroine has to infiltrate it to repay the coppers for saving her girlfriend from an oubliette for the insane, and it is about as bad as you expect from the title.
Read (graphic novel): The New Girl vol 2 (Cassandra Calin): Now that she has a friend group and is getting better at French, our main character can experience more advanced forms of middle-school suffering, like mean girls and romantic ambiguity and medical misogyny. But she does make it to the end of the school year mostly intact and still cute!
Read (manga): Mii-chan Wants to be Kept vol 1 (Waka Takase): Hapless male MC rescues a cat, who turns out to be a specific kind of werecat and won’t go away even though her being gorgeous and immodest is very upsetting. Unnecessarily heterosexual on multiple levels.
Read (manga): Common-Sense Monster vol 1 (Warugi Wanai, Shinobu Shinotsuki): A social maladjusted highschool girl discovers that her popular classmate is actually an anthropophagous horror in a girl suit and asks her to teach her how to fake being a functional member of society. This doesn’t go quite as badly as it could, since the human girl is cunning and the monster is pretty risk-averse.
Read (game): Picaro! (Wythe Marschall): Allegedly from an unsigned manuscript found tucked into a used RPG book from the 70s, rewritten to the finder’s preferred system because game design in the 70s was… not advanced. I have read too many books from the 70s and earlier that started “dunno how this manuscript made it from Mars to my PO box, but here you go” to believe that, but I guess it’s not actually impossible. Anyway, you play cunning rogues sticking it to the Man on behalf of the people. There is one stat that is both how much the people like you, rolled by the players to get help/equipment for their heists, and how much the authorities hate you, rolled by the GM to add more opposition to their heists. Also, many feats/supernatural powers/spells, that all use a single pool of points that decreases throughout the adventure. I am not sure what I think of games that use that mechanic.
Written (Geometry for Mutants): 142. Is this scene really accomplishing any goals, though?
That sounds bad, but really snek is frond.
I accomplished more work than yesterday, possibly because the meeting was cancelled. However, Sunday’s gaming is also cancelled.
Watched (live-action TV): The Librarians 2.1: Introducing the new season villain and his henchman right up front!
Read (graphic novel): The New Girl vol 1 (Cassandra Calin): A Romanian girl moves to Quebec, where she has to attend learning-to-français middle-school and has no friends and her horrible periods have just started and her little brother is learning French faster and also is a git and everything is terrible, at least to start.
Read (from the shelf): FAIL. I read half of a very thick thing, but did not complete anything.
Written (Geometry for Mutants): 235. Something that had been going to happen later fit now, so I put it in. That means I have to come up with something even worse for later, right?
For no sensible reason, I am on call both days this weekend, so I just have to take my computer everywhere during the day and cross my fingers that I don’t need it. I completely failed that by going back to sleep for about four hours after taking handover and feeding the cats, and then as I was starting to move toward going out, the customers attacked. It wasn’t terrible, but it did use up the entire afternoon. I guess I’ll have to try again tomorrow.
Watched (anime): Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End 1.14-16: Side quests, old friends, Stark and Fern’s relationship progressing , Stark and Fern suffer while Frieren eats donuts.
Read (from the shelf): FAIL.
Written (Geometry for Mutants): 171. No good plan yet, although some bad plans dismissed for being unethical or impractical.
Not like in The Prestige, though!
Watched (live-action TV): The Librarians 1.10: Hey, look, everything they’ve collected over the season is important in the finale! Also, the usual ethical questions with respect to timelines that now never happened.
Read (light novel): A Livid Lady’s Guide to Getting Even vol 1 (Hagure Metabo): The traditional young-lady-dumped-by-the-crown-prince-in-favor-of-some-floozie opening. Since this young lady has actually been doing all the work of running the kingdom, she’s happy to have a vacation in jail while waiting for the king and other alleged adults to appreciate how wrong things are going without her, but then she learns they’re off faffing about because of course she’ll take care of it. Then she runs off to the enemy kingdom to set up her own cosmetics empire and not have anything to do with any of those idiots ever again. Unfortunately, she is too perfect for it to be interesting. Also, when war finally comes, we didn’t need that scene.
Read (novel): Tavern Rats (Matt Youngmark): An apprentice wizard who suddenly learns she has to pay off her student debt or leave school formulates a terrible plan to loot a dungeon, assembles the worst adventuring party ever, gets completely lost within a day’s walk of her hometown, and then things really go off the rails. It is extremely D&D (orcs, cantrips, dark elves, tree kraken, druids, etc) but manages to be funny anyway.
Read (comic collection): Doom’s Division (Yoon Ha Lee, Minkyu Jung, Mattia Iacono): I figured anything written by Yoon Ha Lee would be great, but I know nothing about the continuity and am not invested in the characters, so meh.
Written (Geometry for Mutants): 154. My MC needs a really good plan now, and I don’t have one for her.
Depending on how many eggs you have, that might be a very large sugar cookie.
Watched (live-action TV): The Librarians 1.9: I guess this is another universe where mad science is indistinguishable from magic, but we saw that with the STEM fair episode. Surprisingly, the math doesn’t completely fail to work out for the Infernal Device, although the engineering does.
Read (novel): Bones in the Dark (TF Warden): A just-graduated mage of an unsettling magic system gets assigned to be a cop in a provincial city and finds out that real life is more complicated than theory. Also, she kicks a lot of ass, gains even vaster eldritch power, makes friends and enemies, etc.
Read (novel): Stealing Light (Gary Gibson): Same sub-genre as the “Architects of Earth” series: cyberpunk or post-cyberpunk space humans, aliens of various levels up to Completely Overwhelming, weird human factions, alien conspiracies, the scourge that will destroy all, etc. In this case, the scourge hasn’t quite manifested yet, but humans are enthusiastically poking it with sticks in the hope of gaining a tiny bit of power over other humans. Don’t trust the fish-guys.
Read (from the shelf): FAIL.
Written (Geometry for Mutants): 164.
But not me, don’t marry me.
The cats helped me stay in bed, but eventually I did manage to get up and do an errand and read a Maidens of the Fall and go to an anime.
Watched (anime): Witch Hat Atelier 1.12-13: Into the snake cave of the ancient chrysomorphs! Accommodations for trauma brought on by bad pedagogy! Plummeting and doom!
Read (from the shelf): FAIL.
Written (Geometry for Mutants): 179.
Your dog deserves a Thai-Ethiopian fusion wrap!
Did some work, but sadly would have done more work if I were in the office, I suspect.
Watched (live-action TV): The Librarians 1.8: It wouldn’t be a haunted house if they didn’t make all the mistakes. Serves them right for sidelining Cassandra, though.
Read (graphic novel): When I Arrived at the Castle (EM Carroll): Catgirl vs vampire, in a hallucinatory castle full of blood and doom and corpses and nudity.
Read (novel): The Ethersmith vol 2 (Matias Kallio):MC finally makes it to a city where she can wow them with her ethersmithing skills, but surprise! Her grandfather isn’t dead, so there’s a quest and also impending doom.
Written (Geometry for Mutants): 224.
I was technically working today, but feel like I accomplished about as much as a fairly drab catfish.
Watched (live-action TV): The Librarians 1.7: An obvious antagonist, given the Arthurian connections, but not where one would expect her to be.
Read (novel): I’m Not the Chosen One (Richard Roberts): She’s the Chosen One’s little sister, so of course she takes the magic ship and catgirl follower for a joyride. The quest to restore the broken world ensues.
Read (comic collection): Eat the Rich (Sarah Gailey, Pius Bak, Roman Titov): Not subtle, but that’s fine, because fuck those guys.
Written (Geometry for Mutants): 176.
They’re refugees because their asteroid is drying up and they can’t surf, so they need Arcturian Brandy.
I woke up at some point in the morning before I meant to, but although I could have gone back to sleep, I found some scraps of executive function under the dust bunnies and made the slog up to Mountain View to get my fluids medically extracted. Then it was time to provide the cats with gooshy brunch, and I was up and moving so I went shopping and read Maidens of the Fall and ordered a bunch more comics.
No anime, it’s Shakespeare in the Park night! This year’s production is Two Gentlemen of Verona in the 80s, which was silly, and hopelessly patriarchal/heteronormative, but the bicycle bandits wanted their two dollars, which makes up for a lot. Also, bizarrely, I won the raffle so now I have two tickets to the Winchester Mystery House. Not sure what to do with them.
Read (graphic novel): Bad Dream (Nicole Maines, Rye Hickman): Is an alien living on Earth and passing as human while she run away from home a metaphor for transness if she’s actually trans? Part of the same subcontinuity as the Galaxy books, full of queerness and superhero battles and alien family drama. Interfamily drama, even.
Written (Geometry for Mutants): 466. MC definitely needed more to stress over.
Also Film Your Pets Sauntering Day.
Watched (live-action TV): The Librarians 1.6: Not a new concept at all, but reasonably well-done. I’m glad Cassandra got to keep the [SPOILER] and [SPOILER] and hopefully she still has the [SPOILER] as well.
Read (from the shelf): FAIL.
Written (Geometry for Mutants): 236.
Logged in to work early to attend the meeting about using AI in our company. I managed to hold on by muting and yelling at the screen for a while, but then someone started going on about “when Claude is an AGI” and I had to drop. Holy shit, why are people so dumb? (People, of course, are going “holy shit, why is Trip so dumb?”)
Watched (live-action TV): The Librarians 1.5: For a brief moment, it looked like Ezekial and Jenkins were going to get along, or that Flynn was going to return, or that Cassandra was going to go full supervillain, but no. Still pretty good, and further confirmation about Dulaque.
Read (from the shelf): FAIL.
Written (Geometry for Mutants): 283. Do I need the astronomy knowledge now? Maybe I can put it off longer.
Usual shopping and Maidens of the Fall (back from hiatus!) despite the 90° heat, returned home with a pile of comics. A pocket frond live-slacked an extremely alarming yet eventually okay saga that she dealt with much better than I would have in the same circumstance, I’m sure. Ken gave me sausage bean cabbage when we went over for anime, which was quite nice.
Watched (anime): Witch Hat Atelier 1.11: Start of the escort quest test, whether Richeh likes it or not! Also, introduction of the world’s shittiest teacher.
Watched (anime): Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End 1.12-13: The hero’s sword stuck in the rock is introduced. Will that be important later? Who can say? But finally Frieren’s party has a cleric, and is up to four members which is the standard for heroic adventures. Double mages instead of double warriors like her last party, though.
Read (manga): Sanda vol 2 (Paru Itagaki): This world is even weirder about youth than it originally seemed, probably because it’s not just cracktastic, it’s also social commentary.
Written (Geometry for Mutants): 109.
Still hot.
Watched (movie): Project Hail Mary: That was surprisingly awesome for hard SF in movie form, and also a pretty good adaptation of the book. (I had read the book, Marith had not.) Several xenonite appendages up!
Read (manga): Chainsaw Man vol 21 (Tatsuki Fujimoto): The devils are still killing everyone, Denji is still being led around by his dick, and every page is that much closer to the end of the world.
Written (Geometry for Mutants): 117.
It’s always sad when being on call means getting called. I couldn’t even draw a black bear to eat the customers, because I can’t draw worth beans. Fortunately I eventually stopped being on call and could go over to watch anime. Ayse is Abroad, for Tourism, so we did not get distracted, and also Marith’s laundry took a long time, so we had plenty of anime.
Watched (anime): Witch Hat Atelier 1.10: Turns out that able-bodied people being ableist doesn’t make disabled people any less competent.
Watched (anime): Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End 1.9-11: The issue with the demon diplomats is resolved, thanks to Frieren’s special technique, which is presented in such a way as to be legitimately kind of terrifying. Turns out you can get really good at something if you practice it constantly for a thousand years.
Read (novel): Ladies in Hating (Alexandra Vasti): Rival gothic novelists in C19 England, sapphic longing, a mysterious and decrepit manor in the countryside, some light haunting, more sapphic longing. Apparently part of a larger series but the other books seem to be about men or something, so whatever.
Read (from the shelf): FAIL.
Written (Geometry for Mutants): Finally wrote an email about astronomy resources.
Check! Also National Cheese Day, but cheese isn’t really good for cats.
Watched (live-action TV): The Librarians 1.4: That’s one way to handle the plethora of Yule spirits, I guess. Also to oppress Baird, but blondes deserve more oppression, right? Also, I don’t think I caught before that the master villain is Dulaque.
Read (novel): Catch and Kill (Craig Schaefer): Cyberpunk plus magic, apparently the future of the “Harmony Black” series or a possible future of an alternate timeline of it. A tightly-knit team of a mage who was never understood at university, a hacker who’s turning herself into a catgirl, an ex-soldier, and an ex-military killer robot (sexy lady subclass) get mixed up in horrible skullduggery with corporate psychopaths and rival wizards. Much better than book Shadowrun, made me think of Carl Shadowrun.
Read (from the shelf): FAIL.
Written (Geometry for Mutants): 159.
Also National Creativity Day. I am doing better at one of those than the other.
Didn’t sleep in quite as much as most Saturdays, so I guess that’s good. Did some shopping.
Watched (anime): Witch Hat Atelier 1.9: Just because you’re 11 doesn’t mean you can stay up forever, Coco! Also, Tartah, don’t ask those questions, it won’t make anybody happy if you get answers.
Watched (anime): Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End 1.7-8: And now we find out what demons really are and why they are that way, and how some humans still fall for it.
Read (manga): Love Bullet vol 1 (inee): Cute girls saved by the goddess of love from actual death become cupids but it’s the 21st century so they have guns with heart-shaped muzzles, and also they’re kind of fighty, probably because they can’t fall in love even with each other.
Written (Geometry for Mutants): 210. Rewrote what I wrote yesterday to make it more consistent, which arguably is not something I should be doing now, but it was All Wrong.
None of these modern factory-pond turtles that have been bred for nothing but size and transportability!
I was backup on call, so all my usual sleeping in and shopping and whatnot involved a computer sitting nearby, but as it turned out, no one needed me. Story of my life.
When we went over for anime, Ayse offered me some spare hot pot, but I butter-fingered it all over the floor and had to apologize for disrespecting the hot pot, which is like mother and father. This was hilarious to anyone who has seen one specific Chow Yun-Fat movie from the previous century, and incomprehensible to everyone else, as the best in-jokes are. I’m sorry I didn’t get to eat the hot pot, though, because it looked really good.
Watched (anime): Witch Hat Atelier 1.8: And now we know why nobody likes the Knights Moralis, not that Qifrey can complain!
Watched (anime): Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End 1.6: Why yes, despite his personality defects, Stark was trained by one of the legendary heroes. The dragon, apparently, was not.
Read (novel): Spirit Blade (Glynn Steward): An ex-Vatican monster hunter washes up as a bartender in a small city in Canada, where he finds out that monsters are still everywhere around him and also trying to eat his new girlfriend and her magic cat.
Read (novel): That Which Devours: Survive (Jer Patch): Instead of dying, or getting sucked through a portal, the main character arrives in the purview of the System by crashlanding on a new colony planet. It is full of Unexpected Dinosaurs, and also a lot of the colonists don’t seem to have been selected for mental stability, but our MC gets the special S-tier class Eat Their Heart And Gain Their Power. Om nom nom.
Read (from the shelf): FAIL.
Written (Geometry for Mutants): 183.
Have you even seen a pickle salute?
I not only slept in before shopping, I took a nap after shopping. Then we went to see anime and I made Marith stay in the cat-infested house until she expired of sneezings.
Watched (anime): Witch Hat Atelier 1.7: The carriage disaster.
Watched (anime): Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End 1.4-5: And now they have Stark, although he doesn’t realize it yet.
Read (from the shelf): FAIL.
Written (second rewrite of Geometry for Mutants): 381. I need to keep a list of everything my MC makes a mental note of, though, because
If the dinosaur is not large enough to carry you comfortably, riding a tandem bike with them is also acceptable.
Watched (live-action TV): The Librarians 1.3: That was actually better, without the chief librarian to solve everything and tell everyone what to do. I also liked the way the thing was written, very much like a Fallen London status that modifies all your cards until you get rid of it somehow.
Read (novel): Splinter Angel vol 1 (AvaritiaBona): Isekai litRPG, a bodyguard is pulled into fantasyland where she gets an OP bodyguarding class and starts leveling up while trying to find out what is going on with having been sucked into another universe. The gimmick of this one is that the MC is, if not a sociopath, personality disorder of some kind. She’s not mean, but she’s extremely unfussed about violence and also not great at peopling.
Read (from the shelf): FAIL.
Written (second rewrite of Geometry for Mutants): 302.
The Man don’t want us doing the Chicken Dance.
Got Thai food, but I got the very mildest for Marith, and it turned out bland and nobody was happy.
Watched (live-action TV): Good Omens 3.1: Meh. I guess I see why the producers had to wrap it all up in one episode and wash their hands of it, but it could have been a better one episode.
Read (light novel): This Alluring Dark Elf Has the Heart of a Middle-Aged Man vol 1 (Yuhi Shimano, NAJI Yanagida): Pretty much what it says on the tin. A modern-day salaryman is reincarnated as a beautiful young dark elf woman with huge tracts of… magical power, but still thinks of himself as an old guy while making his new adventuring life with impossibly young teammates.
Read (from the shelf): FAIL.
Written (second rewrite of new project which is now Geometry for Mutants): 461, but the way I wrote the edit counter, I get a lot of credit for moving chunks around. I’m not sure how to fix that without a lot of work.
I was on call today, so I didn’t do anything. Some of the doing nothing was sleeping, but some was just doing nothing. Despite that, I was late to hand over to the next person, because I am dumb. I did manage a little shopping after handover.
Watched (anime): Witch Hat Atelier 1.6:We finally meet Olruggio and Coco gives him the rant about her love of magic. Then Agott gets to head out to help with the carriage disaster.
Watched (anime): Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End 1.2-3: Fern joins the party (over the course of like eight years). Frieren really does not understand any people, which is a problem because she is herself a person. She does love magic, though.
Read (from the shelf): FAIL.
Written (second rewrite of new project): 301.
I did not have a good work ethic today. However, I am still doing better than Nightvale, who got his head stuck in the handle of a paper bag and had to run up and down the apartment in blind panic until he went through a narrow space and it tore off. This only took about fifteen seconds, but he made several laps during that time. Poor baby!
Watched (animated movie): Across the Spiderverse: Okay, more verse in the spider, wacky villain, almost coming out to his parents, fight on a beanstalk, horrifying multiversal revelations… CLIFFHANGER?! How very dare! Fortunately the next movie hasn’t actually been canceled yet, so maybe someday we’ll find out what happens.
Read (manga): The Ancient Magus’ Bride: Wizard’s Blue vol 9 (Makoto Sanda, Isuo Tsukumo, Kore Yamazaki): Reread so I can remember what’s going on for the tenth and final volume, which is finally out. (What’s going on is villainous plans.)
Written (second rewrite of new project): 171.
Did my usual sleeping too much and shopping and reading Maidens of the Fall.
Watched (anime): Witch Hat Atelier 1.4-5: The dragon maze sequence, with extra fluffiness.
Read (from the shelf): FAIL.
Written (second rewrite of new project): 281.
Watched (animated movie): Into the Spiderverse: Still as awesome as the first time we watched it.
Read (from the shelf): FAIL.
Written (second rewrite of new project): 408. Yeah, this is better.
If you don’t, it’ll mean war.
Watched (live-action TV): The Librarians 1.2: And the first adventure is concluded, the world is saved, but pretty much any other pair kissing would be better than that.
Read (manga): Dandadan vol 18 (Yukinobu Tatsu): Speed Boy finally gets into the cursed board game, bearing important information… one round too late. Now everything is even more doomed.
Read (novel): A Journey in Other Worlds (John Jacob Astor): Written in the 1890s, about life in the year 2000. It is of course horrifyingly racist and sexist by our standards, but has all-electric everything, habitable planets throughout the solar system, a project to straighten out the Earth’s axis so the climate is always perfect, and Christian antigravity. The end goes into interplanetary afterlife theory, which seemed vastly unnecessary to me, but I guess men hadn’t yet discovered writing without exposition. An artifact of its time.
Written (rewrite of new project): 159. But although this new way of doing the thing is definitely better than the original, I think it’s not good enough yet.
Several of the audience survive every performance!
I slept in incompetently, but eventually went shopping and stuff.
Watched (anime): Witch Hat Atelier 1.3: And away Coco goes, to certain death in the trial she’s not at all qualified for.
Watched (anime): Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End 1.1: The first episode is all backstory and establishing vibes, so following the manga pretty close so far.
Read (manga): The Invisible Man & His Soon-to-Be Wife vol 5 (Iwatobineko): They’re getting mushier and introducing each other to their parents and even moving in together, but not having sex or anything like that.
Written (new project): 219.
Are bats themselves seasonal, or do they need a separate season reference?
Kind of did some work, I guess. Having energy and being awake is hard.
Watched (live-action TV): The Librarians 1.1: Marith’s right that it has Dr Who energy with the cheesy verve, but it’s really really not Leverage, and I can’t help comparing them since it’s the same director and some actors.
Read (manga): A Bride’s Story vol 11 (Kaoru Mori): All Smith and Talas and company this volume.
Read (novel): Sloppy Firsts (Megan McCafferty): High-school drama, but even though the protagonist is straight (ew, boys), she is charmingly misanthropic. Written as her actual diary entries and letters to her long-distance best friend, so there is some unreliability to the narration, or at least a lack of strict chronological ordering.
Written (new project): 264. Sage helped by deleting a paragraph so I had to write it again.
Cue tumblr classic post. “You cannot kill me in any way that matters.”
Planned to WFH today, so got some sleeping in, but not enough to make up for having stayed up until 343569 o’clock reading. Did do some work, failed to meet with the customer again, didn’t learn any Kubernetes, did get piled on by cats.
Watched (movie): Glass Onion: Janelle Monáe definitely stole the show, but all the characters were good characters. Plus, lack of respect for the capitalist class is always refreshing. I liked it quite well.
Read (manga): A Bride’s Story vol 10 (Kaoru Mori): Karluk with his inlaws learning archery and falconry and general manliness, Smith traveling and arriving in Ankara.
Written (new project): 294.
On call today, so I slept in next to the phone after taking handover and only eventually went shopping. Because last weekend was weird, I had bonus Maidens of the Fall, which is always nice. Also a support cast, which was less nice, but not a big deal.
Watched (anime): Witch Hat Atelier 1-2: Pretty much the same as the start of the manga, but now in color with swooping!
Read (manga): A Bride’s Story vol 5 (Kaoru Mori): Wedding day for the twins Smith met in the last volume. Their husbands are already long-suffering. Then back to Amir and Karluk for a sad falconry story and a terrifying granny interlude.
Written (game design): 217:
I have dozens of notes for other points that have to be considered, but
possibly none of them matter at all if we can’t establish mechanics for
how characters affect each other, because that’s the core of superheroic
conflict. Or, really, any conflict, and thus most RPGs except Golden Sky
Stories (which is a great game, but not what we’re going for here).
Obviously I’m making some kind of mistake here, but what is it? Should I
not be worrying about making all results come from written rules, even
though some (most? all? few?) players don’t like GM judgment calls?
Should I not be worrying about how to make things seem fair because they
never are? Just let the table decide who should get fewer dice because
they’re too clever with the ones they have? (Self-serving, because I’m
always the least clever.)
(As previously established, the fundamental flaw is almost certainly
thinking that I can do better than real game designers at anything. I’m
not standing on the shoulders of giants, I’m barely even stepping on
their toes. But that’s too bad, because what else am I going to do? Just
play one of the thousands of games I’ve bought? Pfft.)