Tag: marith

Dinosaurs are the best. Even ones I am not currently eating.

Read: Let’s Do It Already! vol 1 (Aki Kusaka): Not nearly as raunchy as it sounds. She’s a normal modern girl who wants to smooch her boyfriend, he’s the scion of an extremely old-fashioned and rule-bound political family and possibly on the spectrum, their story is not that interesting.

Read: Exes & Foes (Amanda Woody): They used to be best friends until they had a falling-out, they both have terrible parent problems (although hers are definitely worse), now they’re in high school and have both fallen for the new girl. Drama ensues. So much drama. Their friends are very long-suffering.

Watched: Dead Boy Detectives 4: Even-numbered episode, no new boys for Edwin. And sadly, although killing a psychopomp may be gratifying in the moment, it’s not likely to stick.

Written: Exactly 100 of poking at individual sentences, but I think I need to throw all this away and go off in a different direction.

I don’t seem to like chicken fingers (strips, tenders, whatever) anymore. It is very sad.

Did several shops today, so the cats can continue to feast upon gooshyfoods. Also did some more landscaping and copper-oxidizing and whatnot in Minecraft.

Read: United Fleet (Sean Fenian): More improbably-successful wish-fulfillment with alien shipyard and asking people to be reasonable.

Written: 149.

Wow, it’s been a long time. It’s also National Intern Day, so obviously I need an intern to make me a hot fudge sundae!

Did go into the office today, ate a spicy burger, did hardly any work, did remain masked around humans and their virus-filled faceholes.

Watched: Dead Boy Detectives 3: Edwin’s closet full of milkshakes brings approximately 2/3 of a boy to the yard per episode.

Read: Kaina of the Great Snow Sea vol 1 (Tsutomu Nihei, Itoe Takemoto): Tsutomo Nihei far-future megastructures, this time an atmosphere canopy anchored by giant tentacle-trees. Young man in the last village atop the canopy is surprised to discover there are people on the surface, etc. Not sure what the snow sea is made of that doesn’t automatically solve a water shortage, but I’m sure all will be revealed in due course.

Read: No Man Left Behind (WR Gingell): The actual conclusion, in which many surprising events occur. Some of them are perhaps more surprising to the characters than the reader, being heartwarming when Athelas has given up on his heart.

Read: The Moon on a Rainy Night vol 4 (Kuzushiro): This volume is more about deafness than romance, but they are still adorable.

Read: “The Year Without Sunshine” (Naomi Kritzer): Ordinary working-class people coming together during a near-future climate disaster. It’s the wealthy professionals that go all Mad Max.

Read: “One Man’s Treasure” (Sarah Pinsker): Even when there’s actual magic, rich people abuse it and leave huge messes for poor people to clean up.

Written: 305, some fiction and some adventure notes. After reading an actual Perils & Princesses adventure, I realized I need a doom counter and some wrinkle tables.

On the one hand, I feel like this should be a global holiday, and on the other hand, what impact has it had? Humans still suck.

Managed to get up and go shopping not too late, so I could do the other shopping I failed at last weekend and still be at home to sit in front of a fan and go blblblblblblbl. Played a little Minecraft, but the lag was awful so I logged out again.

Watched: Bungo Stray Dogs 4-6: Murder! More murder! Weirdos! More weirdos! Occasional bits of serious plot in between the comedy!

Written: 170. How does writing work? Not like this, apparently.

I am so bad at this. Have I ever made a friend in my life? How?

Watched: Dead Boy Detectives 1-2: The dead boys are very dumb, but at least their living sidekick is a little better. Also the exposition is clunky, but whatever. It’s a cute show.

Read: The Ancient Magus’ Bride: Wizard’s Blue vol 5-6 (Makoto Sanda, Isuo Tsukumo): The war is kicking off, excellent time for a multi-chapter flashback to Ao’s past, which I don’t think we were previously very aware was mysterious. But it is!

Written: 256.

Technically I was on call today, but only as backup in case the weekend shift (we have that now!) ran into something they couldn’t handle, but they didn’t, so I guess I’m fairly gruntled. I was much less gruntled with my whole endealment yesterday and the day before.

I felt a little queasy so instead of getting a big wad of pastrami and sauerkraut, I had a normal roast beef sandwich while doing my shopping and it worked very well. Good job, me.

I did a little landscaping in Minecraft. A diamond shovel with Efficiency 5 just tears through hills, but it also tears through bees that wander into the line of fire, so I had to take a break to go recruit some bees from another hive and breed them up and stuff. Still haven’t managed to set up a flat place for aging copper.

Shoulders still sore, weather still hotter than I would prefer, but embodied existence not much more unpleasant than usual today.

Holy crap, what happened to Republicans thinking “gun control means being able to hit your target”?

Watched: Bungo Stray Dogs 1-3. I have seen some episodes of this, but did not remember the way [SPOILER] walks in and goes “nice comedy show you got here, let me BLOODILY DISMEMBER it”.

Read: No Man’s Land (Elliott Kay): My reading list says I read all previous books in this series, but I don’t remember any of the new alien threat events that this book follows on from. I was able to figure out what was going on well enough that I didn’t feel a need to immediately go back and reread, although I may at some point. Also, I hadn’t remembered that main character’s original job in his local armed forces was specifically preventing war crimes, but there need to be more people on that duty. Also also, extremely worrying details about aliens. I feel like the humans are not scared enough of the Krokinthians, never mind some of the new guys.

Read: Buck the Halls (Zoe Chant): I thought I had read all of Kit’s “Virtue Shifters” novellas except the latest, but no! I had somehow not read this one! I really liked it, because Inner Stag! Tragic Antlers Incident! Additional, Possibly Even More Tragic Antlers Incident! Also no sex and I didn’t miss it, so I must be old now. (Narrator: What does he mean “now”?)

Written: 368, somehow. I guess it’s easy to write a 13-year-old being dramatically depressed?

I need to get some paper bags to put books into for taking to the used book store. Maybe Marith can steal some for me.

Lying with my head on a pillow kind of worked for sleeping, but not very well. I had to take the morning off to recuperate, but my upper torso is feeling a lot better, so I was able to actually do so, and then work in the afternoon. Also, none of us have to stay late on Fridays any more under the new system.

Watched: The Ancient Magus’ Bride 2.24: A little bit of climax, mostly denouement (spellcheck thinks I got that word right on the first try, go me). This is where the latest English volume of the manga ends, so we’re completely in sync and left waiting for more to be translated.

Read: The Witches’ Marriage vol 3 (Studio Headline): Surprisingly, the end! The challenges Melissa and Tanya face in this volume are the Final Trials, and to nobody’s surprise they manage to open the gates by acknowledging their true feelings and enter paradise.

Written: 134.

But I am still terrible at getting pictures of my cats.

Slept way in, was completely useless all day. I played Minecraft for a million hours, including a trading expedition that only got me a few emeralds but a lot of random ore, and enough levels to enchant my diamond chestplate. Then I brainlessly mined blackstone until I had two chests full. It was a lot of mining but now I should be good for building things that match my castle.

Non wanted to play Among Us, so we did, because we do that even in quarantine. I was not very good as a murderer, but I did kill some weird little Minion-looking guys.

Written: FAIL. Didn’t even manage to note down villain stats for the adventure I haven’t managed to playtest.

 

Also Atheists Solidarity Day.

I did not go into the office today, which is for the best because I was already very slow and coughing.

Watched: The Ancient Magus’ Bride 2.21-23: Finally we get all the backstory and the villainous plan and Chise being blasé about being in people’s memories, and yet still a cliffhanger.

Written: 150 of editing.

 

No mermaid sightings today. Not even manatees.

Tomorrow I am on call in the afternoon, so I had to run all my weekend errands today. Food for me, food for the cats, drinks for me, lying in front of the fan.

My Minecraft character now has a good bow again, since even a terrible bow will give a fair bit of durability, and anybody who fishes (Dave. Dave is the one who fishes) will have a million bows with very low durability. Also I went to see the Ice Spikes biome (spiky!) and then delved into the depths to get diamonds to make armor and a sword now that I have enough bookstore credit to enchant them.

Watched: Sacrificial Princess and the King of Beasts 19-21: Well, that seems bad.

Written:182.

Really, shouldn’t 259 days out of the year be World Oceans Day?

I managed to do some errands (but not all) and fail to get temporary checks printed out and still get home in time to play Minecraft be on call. The customers were quiet so I finished the exterior of my castle and the art installation/8-channel lavamatic in the basement, and made a proper setting for my Nether portal. Muahahahaha.

Ayse did not Minecraft with us, because she was busy publishing fanfic on AO3! (It was about a Minecraft actual play or whatever they’re called.) I am very proud of her!

Watched: Nothing, Marith doesn’t want to fall out of the habit of Saturday Night Anime but she also doesn’t want to die.

Written: 127. Still all terrible.

Really a pretty swell invention, even though I haven’t used one in ages.

Watched: Helluva Boss 2.7½: The Sally Mae-visits-Millie special. A bit of the old ultra-violence.

Watched: Helluva Boss 2.8: Marith is right, the fic writers already watched this episode 377 times in simulation and knew how it was going to go, but that didn’t make it less painful. And Blitz was almost a functional adult for some parts of the episode! (Loona, as usual, was secretly MVP.)

Watched: The Ancient Magus’ Bride 2.17-18: All the pieces of the doom are converging!

Written: 132.

DInosaurs, milk, olives, pineapples, black bears, hazelnut cake, nail polish, …

I accidentally turned off my alarm, so I ended up sleeping in until after noon without even meaning to. No dinosaurs for me! However, I did make it to errands and back home in time for Saturday Minecraft. Marith showed me her village and fishpond and evil shrine and ginormous cavern, which were all very nice, definitely better than my black castle of blackness. I also got a bunch of stuff moved from the temporary work camp into the black castle of blackness, and barrels with signs so possibly I can find things.

Ayse did not play Minecraft with us because she was busy finishing up and posting her Minecraft SMP fanfic to AO3. I don’t know anything about the source, but it is a good story in its own right and gives me Amber vibes.

Watched: Sacrificial Princess and the King of Beasts 17-18: Apparently that wasn’t the final boss of the season, but he was super-annoying anyway.

Written: 242

One out of two isn’t bad? (I’m no Meatloaf.)

Went into the office again, but this time all of us who are normally there were there to see our boss, except the one who’s out and the one who had to WFH so really it was just me and Coworker T. Found out that Coworker R is no longer with us, which is sad but honestly not surprising. Ate a rice bowl, sat on a customer call for hours.

Read: She Loves To Cook, and She Loves To Eat vol 4 (Sakaomi Yuzaki): More cooking, more eating, more love!

Played: Zoomwarts! Every magic castle is better with a troll in the basement, right?

Written: 177. I’m really not convinced this second draft is any better than the first draft.

But more importantly, it’s the day Jus gets promoted out of middle school!

Since Support can’t all take Wellness Day off, I took today in lieu so I could go see Jus wear a spiffy dress and walk across a stage and get a certificate. There was surprisingly little shrieking, but a lot of slinky dresses for 8th grade. Afterwards, we waited until restaurants were open and had sushi and ice cream of celebration.

My niece is a high-schooler now. That can’t be right!

Played: Lancer. We defeated the last iteration of the boss and triumphed, but that didn’t really help all the people who had already been killed or were now abandoned by their corporate supply chain or whatever. It’s almost like summoning unfathomable intelligences from beyond space and time to commit war crimes is not as good an idea as Second Committee though. Now we have to figure out what to play next, and it’s probably going to be Kelsey running D&D5e. Maybe I should have volunteered, but nobody wants that.

Read: Strictly No Heroics (BL Radley): A high-school lesbian in a world where some people have superpowers and are basically police with all the corruption of mundane cops and less oversight gets mixed up in an exceptionally villainous plan and there’s a hot girl and many people who need to get what’s coming to them.

Written: 271.

Where’s my Babel fish?

Despite the lack of intra-aural translation services, I walked to grocery shopping for the first time in a million years. I was not slower than before (54 minutes from my door to the sandwich shop), but I could tell I had moved my legs. I need to do this more often, although I should have started before we got into the warm part of the year.

In the afternoon, we played Minecraft together. Dave gave me bookstore credit for a load of sand, so I finally got my diamond pick enchanted, and was able to get some more diamonds to make and enchant another one. Now I can do the thing where you mine ore with Silk Touch and then bring it home to harvest with Fortune III. I also got my castle torn down and rebuilt with better materials and made more progress. Now I need to get a bunch of wood to make more storage, see if I can make a basalt machine, mine a bunch of blackstone, grow produce to trade for emeralds, explore the many caves near my castle, make a new travel bed, plant bamboo for scaffolding, etc, etc.

No anime, Marith is still not feeling up to going places or doing things.

Written: 169. Had to go back and fix several sentences because I’m reading a book written in present tense and that makes me write in present tense. I guess there’s nothing stopping me from writing a story in present tense, but this one has too much written in past tense already.

Two great observances that go great together!

Watched: The Ancient Magus’ Bride 2.15-17: That actually seems pretty tame for a bunch of teenagers locked up for weeks on end.

Read: The Ancient Magus’ Bride vol 17 (Kore Yamazaki): Now I’m ahead of where we are in the anime, and yikes!

Written: 268. Am I drawing this scene out too much? Am I summarizing the wrong parts? Am I just an extremely bad writer?

Your private-equity flower bulbs will not save you from the most cursed of all days!

It is also Frog Jumping Day, and D&D needs way more secret frog magic and way fewer 1st-level wizards with the exact same carefully focus-grouped spells as other 1st-level wizards.

Watched: The Ancient Magus’ Bride 2.13-14: Creepy alchemists, creepy alchemy, monster-murdering class.

Written: 300 exactly.

I, myself, drank one or more beverages today!

Also I did a work or something. Whatever.

Watched: The Ancient Magus’ Bride 2.10-12: So many sketchy people (and things) acting sus! Okay, I guess attempted murder isn’t exactly sus, they were very clear on that.

Read: The Ancient Magus’ Bride vol 4 (Kore Yamazaki): Yay, more dragons!

Written: 161. Second drafts are the worst.

Yes, even student journalists who oppose genocide.

Got handed a case right at the end of the day so I had to work right up to the end, bah.

Played: Zoomwarts. Rosamund tried to do science, Bella got detention, Rosamund found a secret door that was there in her dream, Bella crawled into a hole by herself and went silent.

Read: The Dragon’s Soulmate is a Mushroom Princess! vol 2 (Hanami Nishine, poporucha): Romance therapy is going slowly, but the romance is progressing despite the female lead’s terrifyingly sheltered upbringing.

Read: I’d Rather Have a Cat Than a Harem! vol 2 (Kosuzu Kobato, Hinano Chano): Having befriended almost everyone who appeared in the game, including the probable heroine, the MC goes on to live a happy life with her loving prince and a zillion animals, the end!

Read: Tacticians of Ahm Early Access 0.8.3 (Christian Sorrell): I guess it’s Final Fantasy Tactics the RPG, but (unbeknownst to the characters) set in a digital world that is slowly degrading, introducing corrupt10n. All square grid all the time, most powers have an area of effect in grid squares (often one specific grid square), plentiful multiclassing, etc.

Written: 167.

My plush baby tapir probably needs a better name than “Baby Tapey”, don’t they?

I did the usual shopping things, got unjustifiably mad at Marith for destroying one of the campfires I set up under beehives when I find them, then got Jus’s house blown up because approximately one million creepers attacked while I was stopping by on my way to give Dave dripstone points for a lava factory. Apparently I should just hide in my own valley and never leave.

Played: Minecraft, very very badly.

Watched: Sacrificial Princess and the King of Beasts 12-13: Poor cat princess! She needs to grow up to overthrow the patriarchy! I am very disappointed that the hyena-soldier is a boy, too.

Played: Kick a ball very ineptly down the street so kids can get energy out.

Written: 124. Can’t blame capitalism this time.

Can the aliens come save us from the idea of IP?

Played: Zoomwarts. Food fight!

Read: Sandy Pug After Dark (Various): Varied spec-fic smut: aliens, AIs, monsters, gods, queer people. Needed more editing.

Read: The Exodus Gambit (Glynn Stewart): The start of a new missiles-in-space series, a sort-of princess on the run from the traitorous uncle who murdered the rest of their family, and her bodyguard, trying to outwit their pursuers who have a ship that’s much better in every way and get to help.

Written: 113.

I keep thinking I could try edibles, just for the experience, but have never managed to actually do such a thing. It would probably make my face fall off or something.

What I did do today was go to the very last Spring Fling for Nonny and draw lines on many elementary-school children. Some of the people who were supposed to show up to help Ayse check off kids as they completed laps didn’t show, so I had to help. It was fine, the kids were hardly even traumatized by my appearance, but standing in the same facing for a couple of hours during the middle of the day got me a sunburn on the tops of my calves.

Played: Minecraft. We had another session during which I was super-lame but got to listen to people being super-cool on voice chat, so that was fine. I found a bunch of beehives and managed to both smoke them and not irritate them, so I ended up with a bunch of honeycomb and honey bottles, which I will later use for something clever. Candles, probably. I also found the big pool of surface lava I had seen earlier, which was further inland than I thought. I think it’s actually close to Jus’s homestead.

Written: 164. This isn’t going in the way it should if I want it to sync up with everything else, but I think I know how to fix it.

Plants are good! They make oxygen and food and paper!

Played: Minecraft. After not playing since last Saturday, I am way behind everybody else, but whatever. I still like trundling around mining things and crafting things and seeing things. I found ice, but have no Silk Touch equipment to collect it, and found powder snow to experience the fun of hypothermia. Still not sure where that surface lava is.

Watched: Nothing. Marith wasn’t up for going places, so we all stayed home and played Minecraft more.

Written: 195.

 

Played: Zoomwarts?! How did that happen? I blame Jus and her spring break. Anyway, I wrote off the entire game so far as a dream, which gave the players the opportunity to fix everything wrong with the setting, but they did nothing except move it forward to second year so they could feel superior to the new first-years. Marith had a great idea that I will have to implement if we manage to play again, and also I guess I should find a summary of book four (since that’s the year they’re in) since they want things to be the same-ish.

Written: 141.

Played: Minecraft on our shiny new server! We all logged in at the same time to start off the tree-punching, but by the end of the session, I had barely made a tiny house of plain planks, and other people had enslaved entire villages and mined diamonds. I am really very bad at video games, even ones I enjoy. (So like everything else, really.) We have a lot of cherry blossoms at spawn, though.

Watched: Sacrificial Princess & The King of Beasts 9-11: Anubis and a lot of other beasts still don’t like Sariphi, but so far the king is keeping her safe. Maybe Anubis will eventually come around.

Written: 296.

Played: Librarians Errant. The team, which is now 5th level but still has no cool team name, goes through the Elemental Plane of Books to get to their next stop on the hunt for The Magical Education, instead of walking on muddy roads in the rain and cold like normal people, which saves like 3 days but does get them jumped when they cut through the bad (Dewey decimal) part of the stacks. Fortunately the rabid bat-books and book-lizards (yes, absolutely, you are correct about what they are, no question) are not that much of a problem, and soon the team arrives at the Kryptgarden Branch Campus. Somehow Thaïs is beaten at cute girls by Lily, of all people. Also they meet an absolutely terrifying dragon, find a suspect who is actually a victim, and stop a foolish professor from sacrificing his grad students to bring horrible monsters through a portal from the Feywild. Thaïs finally gets to use both of her new 3rd-level spells, but neither of them helps at all, because this is D&D and there’s no “play to find out what happens”. Bah!

After that I went with Dave back to his lair, to have Easter dinner with everybody. It was very nice because friends and ham and glazed shallots and friends!

Played: Uno Flex. It’s like regular Uno, but you can make the cards do extra stuff if your checkmark is right-side-up.

Written: Only 188, but I had lot of socializing today.