Tag: medical

Got it covered!

No office today, I had to get my meatsack inspected. (That sounds way more risque than anything in my life ever has been.) Needs new chemicals, apparently.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage: Redemption 1.16: The season finale,which both follows on from the previous episode and explains why Harry isn’t there in the next season. And an actual OT3 moment, because measuring somebody for a robot body is true commitment.

Read (manga): The Essence of Being a Muse vol 1 (Aya Fumino): A failed art student finally cannot even with her mother trying to get her to be normal and the horrible people at her office job and feeling like she’s bad at everything, so she runs away, which works out surprisingly well so far.

Read (novel): Big Trouble, Little Earth (JN Chaney, Jason Anspach): The main character is a space trucker, but overall it’s a lot more like a crazed Feng Shui session with the GM’s homebrewed far-future juncture, with all the groundedness and realism that implies.

Read (manga): Succubus & Hitman vol 1-4 (Makoto Fukami, Seigo Tokiya): You know how I sometimes say something is lacking in redeeming social value? I didn’t know what I was talking about. I mean, I read this, but yikes. Content warning for everything bad that can happen to a human or small animal.

Read (short): Gorilla in the Groove (Murphy Lawless): Fated-mate shifters in Ireland, this time a gorilla DJ and a visiting dancer. There is some conflict, because it’s not Virtue Shifters, but mostly just mushiness.

Written (game design): 233:

If you’re thinking that I have no idea how to make a game
anticolonialist, anticapitalist, or antifascist without being Eat The
Reich, congratulations on being absolutely correct. Should I award
myself half a point for insisting that everyone has the same potential
to become touched, and forbidding special bloodlines? Should I take it
away again for making the creatures that stomp all over the land doing
things that make no sense incomprehensible ultrahumans instead of
people?

Is making the PCs mechnically distinct from NPCs (such as by having only
player-facing rolls, or even NPCs not have stats at all, like in FitD;
or by having some NPCs not have hit points) bad in this respect? Even if
the difference is allegedly only at the level of mechanics and not
reflecting anything in-character, it still lends the PCs a sparkle of
Extra-Specialness, which seems contrary to the spirit of the thing. On
the other hand, Eat the Reich is about literal vampires.

Story points or other metacurrency have a similar problem with forcing
the story in a particular direction, which seems wrong. This ties into
the thing with not rewarding PCs for being good (morally) since then
they’re not making moral choices, they’re just grubbing for points. I
have no idea where I’m going with this, I’m not actually an emergent
story purist, I don’t think, despite liking Play To Find Out What
Happens.

Yum, squash!

Went to get some Thai lunch to fuel up for very minor errands and accidentally got vaccinated for the latest fashions in Covid and influenza. There was some kind of festival with bicyclists and tents occupying the street, but none of them seemed very interesting, so they could not stop me.

Read (manga): Girls’ Last Tour vol 5-6 (Tsukumizu): I’m not sure what other ending there could have been, but yikes.

Written (game design): 232.

Thanks, Jeremy and Ken!

Sleeping wrapped in velcro bands and wires and nose cannulas and finger clamps wasn’t as bad as I feared, but it definitely wasn’t good, and I did have to get up early to take the stuff back to the place, so it was not a vigorous day. I’m also not sure I even generated any data, since I had to put on the velcro straps myself, and society wants single people to die.

Played (Changeling the Lost): Ken’s 90s Berkeley. Now our changelings hate this King Mark guy, because he sent a little punk to shake down their new friend Troll for hedge fruit (which he didn’t have, because he already gave it to Theophania & co).  They go into the hedge looking for fruit which they may give to Troll if he wants it, and find some stabapple (not edible, maybe useful for stabbing), something that causes the eater to try to eat more and more of it until they die, and grapes with eyes inside and vines that almost strangle Theophania before she can use one of her few contracts to disable the security. We close on them arguing (Theophania with gestures) over whether to steal the grapes.

Read (graphic novel): Codex Black: A Fire Among Clouds (Camilo Moncada Lozano): Mesoamerican fantasy! A girl with a god-inhabited shawl goes in search of her long-lost father, meets a boy (not like that) who has even more mysterious magic, they have some adventures, get mixed up in and robbed by yet more magic, etc. It is pretty cute and there’s not much on-screen human sacrifice.

Written (catgirl): 118.

I’m sure Sage and Nightvale would still be very affectionate even if they could open canned food on their own!

Had to get up early to get a home sleep monitoring apparatus, which looks very alarming. Also I will have to get up early tomorrow to return it, after trying to sleep in it.

Read (graphic novel): The History of Everything (Victoria Evans): One best friend finds out that she’s moving, so she tries to make their last summer memorable with a list of things to do, but the other best friend gets a boyfriend and everything is terrible until they manage to make up.

Read (novel): It’s a Love/Skate Relationship (Carli J Corson): Hockey Girl gets suspended from the team for fighting off the ice (he totally deserved it) and ends up having to help Figure Skating Girl train, who is terrible and obnoxious and yet so hot and in need of rescuing from heterosexuality and figure skating is actually kind of awesome.

Written (catgirl): 208.

I have one of those!

Got up early to go to the sleep doctor, who set me up to get a home sleep study machine in a few weeks when it’s available. Will this help at all? Who knows.

Read (graphic novel): The Ghost and the Stolen Dragon (Svetlana Chmakova): Sequel to Be Wary of the Silent Woods, in which there are more and worse problems for our middle-school Weirns and also snotty girl is still snotty.

Read (manga): Yellow Stringer vol 1 (Goeffrey Jean-Louis, Frederick L Jones): Intrepid tabloid reporters on the trail of monsters, which obviously don’t exist so they get no respect. One is an ex-cop, which was sus, but it turns out that in fact ACAB and he was driven out for not being enough of a bastard. I don’t know why I count this as manga, when it’s not Japanese at all, but I do.

Read (novel): Something Spectacular (Alexis Hall): Another very queer Regency romance thing, following one of the secondary characters from the first book as she completely falls for a nonbinary opera singer and hijinks ensue. Also boinking.

Read (novel): Chimera’s Fall (Glynn Stewart): Eleventy-millionth in the series about magic missiles in space, now with massive logistical undertakings to go with the space battles. No, more massive than that.

Written (game design): 165.

Use your knees to avoid goose-stepping!

I am on vacation so it’s okay that I’m mostly useless. I did get my flu and COVID shots, though, and pretend to do some prep for the con.

We finally managed to have some Tuesday gaming. Now we’re making characters for Ken’s 90s East Bay Nostalgia Changeling game. I think I have failed. My character, despite having a good name (Tiffany “Theophania” Whitney) is not enough unlike me, so will be terrible. On the other hand, it’s Changeling, so maybe the characters are supposed to be terrible.

Read: Delicious in Dungeon vol 6 (Ryoko Kui): More old friends! More intrigue! More ninjas! More trouble! New quest!

Written: 326.

I checked, I am still registered! But I’m not in a state with a red government, so it wasn’t likely I would have been disenfranchised.

I thought I was being clever in getting two medical appointments on the same morning so that I would only have to take half a day off work, but then I biffed it. The second appointment needed me to not eat or drink anything for three hours previously, so I had early breakfast, but when I went to check in for the first appointment, I found out that I was supposed to have been fasting for that too. Had to reschedule for a month from now, on the first day of my Big Bad Con vacation. I did manage to get the infrasound(?) test taken successfully, and then since the clinic is right there in Mountain View, went to the office to eat Thai food and do a work. The office isn’t any different on Tuesdays than on Thursdays, it turns out.

Read: Galaxy: The Prettiest Star (Jadzia Axelrod, Jess Taylor): An alien princess in exile and her retainers are hiding out on Earth of the DC universe. The magic disguise avocado has turned her into a boy human, which is not what she wants at all, but her retainers insist on not breaking cover no matter how miserable she is. Then she meets a girl.

Played: Perils and Princesses: The end! The princesses successfully resolved the problem in a completely different way than the first group. After that, we talked about Ken’s proposed Changeling: the Lost game. I have no idea how to be a human in the East Bay in the 90s, or even a 90s human at all.

Written: 241.

 

No work today, only riding the bus. Also a visit with a hepatologist (I probably have a liver) and a thyroid ultrasound (will find out about having a thyroid later), but mostly riding the bus. I read a lot of manga.

Also no gaming, Kelsey’s job is being horrible.

Read: The Tiger Won’t Eat The Dragon Yet vol 2 (Hachi Inaba): The title doesn’t mean nobody else is getting eaten, and now we know why everybody hates dragons. But also interspecies adoption, which always makes me happy.

Read: Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End vol 4-5 (Kanehito Yamada, Tsukasa Abe): Mortal life is made of meetings and partings, and also finally getting around to testing for first-class magedom even though it’s not like mage guilds last long enough for it to be worth the bother.

Read: The Duke of Death and His Maid vol 1 (Inoue): A boy cursed to kill everything he touches lives in a remote manor with only a hot maid who delights in taunting him, and some other servant who isn’t important because he doesn’t have cleavage.

Read: Mysterious Disappearances vol 2 (Nujima): The school mystery is finally resolved, but it’s still not clear what’s going on with Mysterious Boy and Mysterious Girl. Still pretty raunchy.

Written: 222,

I’d say it me, but actually when I went to the doctor on the way to the office to get physicalled annually, she seemed to think I was doing very well. Ichor not too sweet, nerves transmitting impulses, etc. I should reflect some sound waves so they can count my organs, but that’s just a regular thing.

Arrived in plenty of time to go to the Big Boss Meeting (he did not assume a final form, there wasn’t even a different soundtrack, 5/10 at most) and eat a veggie burrito and maybe even do a little work.

Read: FLCL omnibus (Gainax, Hajime Ueda): The art style is sketchy, which is good for an air of surreality, but not so good for figuring out what’s going on in any given panel. Seems to mostly follow the anime, but I’m not sure about the end. Very confusing, so apparently it does have FLCL nature.

Read: Front Desk (Kelly Yang): A 10-year-old girl immigrates from China with her parents in 1990 and ends up helping them manage a hotel. MC is 10, so she makes the best of it, but white Americans of every age are horrifyingly racist to everybody, immigrants who made it are horrible to immigrants who are still poor, etc. Distressingly autobiographical.

Written: 243.

Hurray for cats! I should have given them extra treats, though.

Didn’t go to the office, did go to the endocrinologist. She was very happy with my numbers, which did match (at least on average) what my arm weasels have been reporting. Yay me.

Read: Bloody Sweet vol 3 (NaRae Lee): Finally, Fetechou’s dark past is coming back to haunt him and Naerim!

Read: Chainsaw Man vol 3-4 (Tatsuki Fujimoto): There is no such thing as a bit of the old ultraviolence in this series, which means a lot of attrition in allied characters. Also, hard-core training montage for people who can be resurrected, and still no makeouts for the main character.

Read: Peach Boy Riverside vol 1 (coolkyousinnjya): After his story, Momotaro goes on to look for more ogres to defeat, and meets a princess who wants to see the world even though the world is full of monsters. Surprising revelation!

Read: Demon’s Ascent (Erios909): LitRPG, one plot thread following the OP isekai demoness, another following a local girl who is also kind of OP, eventually they meet cutely and work on solving each other’s problems.

Written: 184.

I didn’t celebrate, but I do like peanut brittle! I should get some of the See’s sugar-free.

No commute to the office today, but I did have to ride the bus a lot to get to the doctor for my second shingles vaccine dose. It was kind of a pain, but I got some reading done, and I’m okay with going to some trouble to not get shingles. It sounds dreadful.

Read: The Archive Undying (Emma Mieko Candon): Sometimes the AI gods of far-future city-states implode, taking any worshippers who happen to be directly connected with them. Sometimes the worshippers survive and can be used to make giant robots. It gets more complicated from there, with intrigue and M/M romance and existential despair and poor decisions and brain-eating.

Read: Reborn As A Vending Machine, I Now Wander The Dungeon vol 1 (Kunieda, Hirukuma, Hagure Yuuki): A vending machine enthusiast is killed by a falling vending machine and isekais as a magic vending machine. Fortunately he falls in with someone superstrong who carries him around so he can provide his bounty to many adventurers. There is a lot of murder and colonialism, though.

Read: Glitch vol 1 (Shima Shinya): A high school and middle school sibling (the older might be nonbinary?) move to a small down and team up with some other kids to investigate the strange creatures and mysterious apparitions of their town. Has a nice clean art style and mysteriously strange mysteries.

Read: Death by Irish Whiskey (Catie Murphy): Fifth in the “Dublin Driver” series and also the author’s FIFTIETH BOOK. This time the murders are at a whiskey competition and Meghan really tries not to investigate (for all the good that does anybody).

Written: 107. It’s not nothing.

Penguins! They exist! Had you heard?

Today I accomplished all the things I planned to do, surprisingly. I did get up too early to get phlebotomized, then made it to the bookstore, a sandwich shop, and the grocery before arriving back home in plenty of time to be on call all afternoon. I was even able to almost entirely ignore customers and travel to Monkeycat Towers to watch more Madoka Magica. So yay me, I guess.

Watched: Puella Magi Madoka Magica 4-6: We finally got to the episode where Kyubey explains what’s really involved in becoming a magical girl. “Why does everybody react the same way when they find out? I don’t understand humans.”

Read: D&D5e Tome of Beasts 3 (Scott Gable, Richard Green, Kelly Pawlik, Sebastian Rombach, Mike Welham, et al): A pretty good monster book, although like all modern D&Ds it takes a Linnaean approach to monsters.

Written: 175.

Darn, I’ve run out of chocolate-covered chocolate.

Somehow I got up and did things today. Not sure how that happened, but here we are, with fresh produce and bao and flu antigens and the return of anime night and everything.

Watched: Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts 2.3-4: Looking for Kipo’s backstory, but getting Wolf’s along the way.

Watched: Sacrificial Princess & The King of Beasts 1-4: Our first show for revived anime night! It’s pretty fluffy, with hardly any humans being devoured on screen, and so far the princess is only being compassionate, not getting into administration like rumor has it she will. It’s a full season, though, so we have plenty of time yet. Probably not enough for the cat princess to redeem herself, though.

Read: My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom vol 8 (Satoru Yamaguchi, Nami Hidaka): More of the same, including a flashback to Katarina’s earlier teen years when other girls were just as unable to deal with her. Apparently next volume they graduate and get jobs, but I can’t imagine it will change Katarina at all.

Written: FAIL.

I keep resisting the urge to buy More Dice. Maybe I’m a bad gamer. I mean, for more reasons than previously mentioned.

Finally managed to start using the new bloodometers (the kind you stick on and leave in place for two weeks), so at least I could tell the doctor I was doing it. She probably would have been happier if I had done it months ago like I said, though.

Also finally dragged my computer desk into my bedroom so I could plug it back in. Fortunately it is not too far from the wifi router.

Watched: Scott Pilgrim Takes Off 1-3: After the end of the first episode (which was suitably surprising to Marith), it’s all the other characters all the time! I heard that this show is partially a response to people who esteemed Scott too highly (looking at you, SP) and now I believe it.

Written: Regular FAIL.

I have two of those!

I did get up at 6 to ride the bus for a long ways, and it paid off because there was almost no wait to get phlebotomized even without an appointment. Then, after a short break to recharge my phone and caffeine levels, I went to visit kitties. The one Ayse recommended was not particularly impressed with me, but there were two others who sat in my lap and purred me for various times. They are very nice cats, but now I have to overthink whether they are the right cats.

Written: 345, accumulated half a sentence at a time over the past however long.

Okay, I got this one covered! As long as it’s not finish an ebook day.

Cleaners came early in the morning so I did not get to sleep in like I sometimes do on Monday, but I’m not sure lying abed actually does me any good. Also had a video appointment with a doctor who said my neck is not actually mutating further, but was willing to order a test to see if it’s doing chemisty. Also she reminded me to do all the things I should be doing. Ugh.

Read: “Headphone Boy” (Nana Afadua Ofori-Atta): Someone reminisces about meeting their husband in one of the many magical realism timelines in which that happened.

Written: 320.

No confirmation from the office that we have valid Internet, so we’re all WFH today. This turned out a little annoying for me, as I had to go to my afternoon doctor appointment in Mountain View from way down in San Jose, instead of from just down the street, but hey, if the company can’t be arsed to get network working before trying to make people go in to the office…

Now I have many referrals to specialists which this time I will definitely follow up on and not ignore for months on end, right? Right?

Written: 170/984/12073.

It is also the birthday of my slack friend who loves manuls the most, so clearly she wins at life.

I can’t get up in the morning to write, but I can get up to slog all the way up to Mountain View for the blood draws I’ve been putting off. You’d think that would be much more work, but it’s a simple task with no cognitive requirements and a real scheduling requirement. (Later it turned out the busses were all messed up and I did have to think about what to do, and also walk, but it started out easy.) By the time I got back to San Jose, it was apparently church time, because I was able to get seated for brunch immediately. I almost certainly should not have eaten any of that, but it was really good.

Then I got home and it was all Minecraft all the time. Nonny is sick, so it was remote Minecraft, but I found a secret ravine behind a mountain that had piles of coal, and then a cave with more coal. I also got lost a lot, and missed out on seeing the amethyst geode, but that’s okay. There will be be more Minecraft parties. When everybody else was done, I made worlds based on the RNG seeds of Marith’s world with red sand and a mesa and a huge dripstone cave, and Ayse’s world with giant holes everywhere. I haven’t done much hole exploring, but I have a jungle house and a great hatred of bamboo.

Read: Chosen of Chaos (Benjamin Medrano): It’s like a cross between Dark Matter (dragons and wizards in space) and Tenchi Muyo (some individuals are as powerful as entire fleets of ships). There are almost no male characters, but the MC is so OP (in combat, in finance, in bed…) that she never faces any challenge whatsoever.

Written: 238 words, which is not much for a week. Maybe two weeks.

I did manage to do some work, although probably not as much as I should have, and also got a flu shot so I’m immunologically qualified to go to Thanksgiving and see Finley. I scheduled a fourth covid shot as well, which I probably should have done before Big Bad Con, but some weirdo in a long scarf hijacked my time machine so now I can’t do that then. Anyway, time to begin stressing about how I am a failure at life due to having no children or child-related activities to talk to real grownups about!

Written: 410 NaNoWriMo words. So trending in the right direction, but still very feeble.

Blew off work in the afternoon to go meet my new Primary Care Physician, who is astoundingly perky and cute-sounding and swapped recommendations for SFF books and how can anyone be that energetic? Anyway, I have referrals for sleep and brain and a prescription for brain pills and am probably not dead.

Watched: Moon Knight 1-2. Okay, that’s pretty interesting, even if the implications re free will are unexplored. (I have no idea what ancient Egyptian theology thought about free will, if anything.)

Read: Zachary Ying and the Dragon Emperor (Xiran Jay Zhao): Contains approximately 300% more Chinese history than Iron Widow, but 90% less murder, 100% fewer threesomes, and 75% less Wu Zetian. And it’s set in the near future on Earth and full of magic and written for middle-schoolers. Probably already banned in most red school districts.

Written: 422 kitten words.

Although I had no meetings scheduled for the afternoon, that did not actually make it a good time to take off work because I had meetings all morning which made it hard to find time to get ready to go. But, somehow, I did it and made it to the dentist for crown replacement. Apparently now crowns are while-U-wait instead of just taking measurements for a later appointment, but I made it back in time to pretend to do some work and even get a soft dinner of chicken tenders. Which I then chewed on the side of my mouth I have rarely used this millennium, to protect the (abused flesh around the) new crown, probably hurting myself more than if I had just chewed on the crown side. You’d think I’d know how to eat by now, but no.

Played: Eclipse Phase 2. Apparently this station is even creepier than the marines originally thought. Also, daily survival rolls to go with the daily SAN rolls! Dave’s character failed, but we managed to keep him from being dissolved by acid. This time.

Words: FAIL. Did I mention I have to get up two hours early tomorrow?

Zoom medicine, which I guess went okay. I might be taking more of one medicine and less of another. I have to go back in October to get my thyroid punctured again.

Read: Bladed Magic, Misery’s Way, and Haunted Blade (JC Daniels): Possibly even bigger problems, still solved with a lot of angst and violence, also spinoffs/expansions of things that happened between books.

Words: check.

No gaming, our GM is unavailable, possibly due to moving house. Instead I shambled my way up to Mountain View to get my ichor sucked out before my doctor appointment tomorrow. Then I shambled back home to be completely useless all day.

Read: Jack Four (Neal Asher): Polity demilitarized zone, horrible humans, horrible bug monsters, amnesia, the old ultraviolence, fairly predictable twist.

Words: check, I guess.

Jus’s virtual Shakespeare Camp presented their abridged video of the subplot of Twelfth Night (there are only four of them!), which was extremely cute. Jus played two characters who were distinct (Maria and Olivia), and Malvolio was thoroughly pranked.

After that, I went to a medical facility to have my thyroid ultrasonicated, which involved lying down in a warm, dark room and therefore almost put me to sleep. Later I will find out if my thyroid is mutating uncontrollably.

Watched: Avatar the Last Airbender 3.13-14: Prison break episodes!

Watched: The Case Study of Vanitas 1: Vampires, top hats, airships, mysterious maladies, extreme smugness.

Words: Check.