Tag: monkeycat towers

Also National Eat a Hoagie Day, which I did.

Played a little Minecraft after failing to do anything for weeks, checked out Marith’s base which is a maze of lava and villagers and art and now fish, still not sure what if anything I want to do next. I could build another thing now that Dave has told me how to make copper bulbs light up. Marith offered to let me build it in her Cavern of Wonders, but it might actually belong on  top of the ridge of cherry trees. I could try the trial chamber that Ayse and Dave found, but I’m pretty sure that I would just die instantly with my basic enchanted diamond gear and no skillz.

Ayse has been doing lots of writing, because she is smart and talented and her brain has the basic functionality of doing things, which mine doesn’t. Good for her!

Watched: Bungo Stray Dogs 13-14: Extended flashback to when Dazai was a Port Mafia bigwig. Unsurprisingly, this looks like it’s going to end poorly.

Nightvale might have made a small miau? It would be noisy, yet adorable, if he learned that from Sage.

Written: 172, for all that’s worth (which is nothing).

 

Also Ken Day (Observed) but he doesn’t like people to make a big deal of it. We went over to help him watch MST3K, though.

Watched: MST3K: Space Mutiny. Mutiny on a generation ship is a simple concept that should be doable even in the 80s, so how did they make it so bad? Even in South Africa? The frame story was pretty nonsensical too. Because MST3K.

Written: 242.

Hi Jus!

Still testing negative, although I actually started too early so I should test a couple more times before declaring victory.

Successfully did some shopping, played some Minecraft (blazes suck), visited people for anime and conversation and hugs.

Watched: Bungou Stray Dogs 1.7-9: That’s a very strange condition for a power. How did they even find out about it?

Written: 101.

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.

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?

Another massive failure on my part.

It is the Saturday before a normal work week, so I went grocery shopping as normal (including pastrami sandwich and webserial chapters and bookstore accidents), and it is a normal Saturday so Marith and I went over to watch anime with Dave. I am going to declare that chapter of Covid closed.

Watched: Sacrificial Princess and the King of Beasts 22-24: This usurper has a more cunning plan than the last, but his personality defects are not any less. HEA!

Read: Hell For Hire (Rachel Aaron): 5000 years ago, Gilgamesh conquered the afterlife and now controls almost all magic, access to heavens and hells, enslavement of demons, suppression of human awareness of the supernatural, etc. Not everybody appreciates the rule of the Eternal King, though, and various people’s dissatisfactions lead to violence. (Also possibly romance.) The FL’s secret identity is not actually very secret, but that’s okay. Presumably the revolution will really get going in the next book.

Written: 104 of catgirl high jinks, but also some prep for gaming tomorrow.

To the extent the Supreme Court will let us not have kings, anyway.

I went back to Ayse’s skeleton farm to build up levels and complete my diamond suit. I broke the anvil, though, so I had to go home to finish up. Also I’m going to need to go back to drop off a new anvil.

In the evening, I trundled over to Monkeycat Towers to see fireworks. I meant to be on time, but was suddenly starving as I passed In’n’Out, which used up all my spare time but not any extra. I also meant to be not a plague vector, but Ken was extremely nervous, so we just stayed outside and I masked the whole time. There were fireworks on that side of the hill! There were fireworks on another side of the hill! There were fireworks here and there and the other place across the city! However, when Ken and Jus were going to drive me home (because the bus doesn’t run late on holidays) there was a large and alarming fire on the next hill over and there had to be a delay so that they could pack bags and cats in case of evacuation. I did eventually get home, though, and also nobody I know was incinerated.

Written: 113.

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.

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

No, really! I used to have hair!

Gaming is cancelled today, so I slept in forever and then some, and finally feel like I’ve caught up from when I stayed up too late reading a week and a half ago. Then after doing a lot of nothing, I went over to Monkeycat Towers to eat tasty, tasty fajitas. Jus had half a dozen of her friends over for a Shrieking Party, and one of the friends’ moms stayed to make sure there were no axe murderers, so I kind of vaguely helped Ayse make conversation. Nobody fled screaming, the kids had a great time, the fajitas were delicious, everything was good.

Written: 208.

Instead of going shopping and eating pastrami and such, I went to Ayse and Ken’s and we watched Eurovision! It sucks that the Netherlands got kicked out and Israel didn’t, and also that so much popular vote was wasted on Israel. (Just on principle; the bus was terrible so I didn’t see their song.) It was the year of goth fae and witches, but it is okay that Switzerland won with their nonbinary meow-meow. I think that both Ireland and Finland should have placed much higher, however. Why did people not ask me before casting their votes?

Also we engaged in friendship activities and got squished by Jus and ate Thai food, and then I went shopping at the other grocery store and did not go into the bookstore because I was there just last week!

Marith missed out because she fears the germs.

At home, I played some Minecraft.

Read: The Ancient Magus’ Bride vol 12: More College backstory and doom and doomed backstory.

Written: 129. I’d say being social all day used up my brain cells, but no one thinks I had any to begin with.

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.

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.

Did a supervillain write this?

I managed to do most of the things I needed to do before being on call in the afternoon, and then I managed to fix the customers enough that I could go over to dye eggs and eat sushi with Ayse and Ken and fam. Marith insisted on driving me over, but could not stay because she was feeling poorly, which was very sad.

Written: 237 words. I was having too many infodumps, so I guessed that it was because I started the story too early and have jumped ahead to where I started it the first time. Will my greater knowledge of what’s going on make it better, or was it better when everything was mysterious?

I did successfully observe this, so intensively that I could not get out of bed until after 10! Although next year Nightvale and Sage will both be officially grownup cats.

Once i was able to escape, I did the shopping and the other shopping and the pastrami and the additional shopping and a lot of crafting in Shop Titans so I could complete my bounty before the deadline and some writing (not last thing at night!) and reading, instead of being a useless lump all day.

At dinner time, Marith and. went to Monkeycat Towers to eat many barbecues and bask in the affection of friends. People said many nice things about me, just because we were celebrating my birthday or something. I am not as good at eating barbecue as I used to be, but I’m better at accepting compliments. About even on accepting parasite-rated chocolate cream pies.

Read: Spy x Family vol 11 (Tatsuya Endo): Of course Anya used her powers to get through it

Read: The Tiger Won’t Eat The Dragon Yet vol 1 (Hachi Inaba): Once upon a time(?) in a land where beasts can talk and sometimes take human shape, a tiger brings down a young dragon. She decides he’s too small to eat now, so she should raise him to be a more suitable meal, and that’s where things start to go wrong. The beasts have clothes in their human forms (suspiciously modern ones in the dragon’s case) but there’s otherwise no sign of civilization or humans, so I guess it’s like a fable.

Written: 227. Could have been more, but I caught up on this instead.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH! There, how was that?

Had to be on call in the afternoon, and there were annoying customers, but I escaped to Monkeycat Towers for anime night anyway.

Watched: Princess Tutu 5-6: Uh oh, Fakir is getting suspicious! Although he was pretty sus to begin with.

Watched: Sacrificial Princess & The King of Beasts 8: Hah, called it!

Written: 177. Got to a point in planning where I diverge from the first graph, so that’s probably something.

Yay, I finally get a day!

Did a grocery shop, was useless and dumb. Fed the cats, though.

Watched: Princess Tutu 4: More feelings for Mytho, but Fakir is becoming suspicious. (He was always pretty sus, to be honest.)

Watched: The Sacrificial Princess and the King of Beasts 7: Well, okay, I guess.

Written: 122.

The weather was so nice today, I did actually buy tortilla chips and guac and salsa. Also ate my pastrami sandwich outside.

The traffic was not so nice when an accident forced us to double back and wander lost in the maze of brightly-lit car dealerships, but if I were not so dumb, we would have been fine.

Watched: Princess Tutu 2-3: Anteaterina! Also some plot stuff about why Ahiru’s necklace glows or something. Jus concurs that Drosselmeyer is not a good substitute for a cute animal companion, though.

Read: Wear Wolf (Murphy Lawless, Zoe Chant): The most recent Virtue Shifters book. When the blurb said the FL also had a secret, that is not what I was expecting!

Read: “It Answered” (Anastasia Kirchoff): Maybe we shouldn’t have asked… But hey, how can you complain about utopia?

Written: 121. Could possibly have been more if I hadn’t had to finish reading somebody‘s book about a fashion designer and a schoolteacher with a secret.

Hurray for pangolins! I don’t know why I like them, but I do.

Apparently I also like being a useless lump, because that’s what I did today. I was on call in the afternoon and had to do some work, but only for a little while. Then in the evening we accomplished anime night again. Huzzah!

Watched: Sacrificial Princess & The King of Beasts 5-6: You can tell that new character is no good, he was mean to Amit!

Watched: Princess Tutu 1: Apparently we aren’t showing Jus Utena just yet, but Tutu seems weird enough for now.

Read: Crawljammer vol 4-6 (Tim Callahan, et al): More space adventure nonsense for DCC, random tables and adventures and random tables and classes and random tables.

Read: Dog of the Dead (Delia Marshall Turner): A no-nonsense middle-aged English teacher is bequeathed a mysterious giant egg by a student she sort of recognizes, and then everything goes downhill. Way downhill. Everything is eventually explained, but it is dream-like and elliptical getting there. I liked it, but it was pretty weird.

Written: 190. No, still not right.

Year of the Dragon, which is definitely auspicious and not a sign of doom.

I was too lazy to go grocery shopping before getting back to be on call all afternoon, and even if I hadn’t been, I wouldn’t have been able to go to the ice cream store. Instead I flopped around and then had to do some work and complain bitterly and throw out five bags of food from the fridge that was no longer trustworthy after the power outage. Eventually that ran out and Marith and I went over to Monkeycat Towers. We meant to go for anime, but instead we had really good Chinese food from Ken and Among Us with Nonny, which was all pretty great. I managed to win as the imposter! Then we switched to hide-and-seek mode, which I didn’t really understand because I’m old. Seeing people makes me happy.

Read: “Stubborn Stains” (Delia Marshall Turner): Turner wrote two books of an interesting fantasy/SF trilogy and then apparently disappeared, but now I learn that she has written the third book and this short story about a schoolteacher who gets involved with magic and a whole book about the schoolteacher! (The books are only available on Amazon, boo, but I’ll probably buy them anyway.)

Written: 125.

I had the ice cream for lunch dessert, but it was Humphrey Slocombe “Secret Breakfast”, so I’m saying it counts.

Apparently my new Saturday routine is to go to Togo’s and eat a pastrami sandwich and drink multiple flavors of Diet Dr Pepper from the drink robot, on the way to the book store and grocery store. The ice cream store doesn’t open until noon, and I usually try to get my act together before then, so it will have to be intermittent.

Watched: Puella Magi Madoka Magica 10-12: The end! Jus was appropriately emotional at finding out Homura and Madoka’s deal. Not sure what to show her next, maybe Revolutionary Girl Utena.

Written: 122 of outlining. I don’t know what these aliens should look like. I wrote some stuff down, but it’s probably not right.

But does “chocolate cake” mean chocolate crumb and any kind of frosting, any kind of crumb and chocolate frosting, or chocolate crumb and chocolate frosting?

Today I ate a pastrami cheesesteak, which was okay, did some grocery shopping, and was a massive lump because I felt lethargic and headachey and bleah. My guess it was side effects from the vaccination yesterday. Still better than anything I’ve ever heard about shingles.

Watched: Puella Magi Madoka Magica 7-9: Oh good, Jus was appropriately disturbed to find out how the magical ecosystem works and what Kyubey’s role is.

Written: 147.

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.

Today was a day of uselessness I mean relaxation.

In the evening, we had anime again, so I at least had to leave the apartment, even if it wasn’t exactly useful.

Watched: Puella Magi Madoka Magica 1-3: Jus is now old enough to see this! We got to the all-important third episode, so she wants to keep watching.

Written: 254.

Marith could not come because she doesn’t want to be sick and still have to go work in our third-world hellhole, but I fear no germs so I went to have New Year’s Eve sushi and games and movies and companionship. (There was also Korean fried chicken, but we had so ridiculously much sushi that we didn’t get to it.) There were hugs and chonky cats and eventually toasts and fireworks. Bizarrely, transit did not have after-midnight runs for partiers, so I had to beg a ride home from Ken, but that was the only flaw in an otherwise lovely evening.

Watched: Umbrella Academy 3.8: I guess that’s one thing to do while destroying the universe.

Watched: Mystery Science Theater 3000 4.21: Circus on Ice and Monster-a-Go-Go. That movie definitely earned its place in the “Worst Movies of All Time” bucket! Apparently it was built on the bones of an incomplete previous movie, but that doesn’t come close to explaining the awfulness.

Played: Innovation. I’m still terrible at this game but at least Jus didn’t beat me. (We tied for last.)

Played: Uno. Ken kept catching me out on calling uno, hmph.

Played: Poetry for Neanderthals. Another of the “try to get your teammate to say the word” games. The schtick for this one is that the prompter can only use words of one syllable, and if they mess up, a member of the team gets to hit them with an inflatable club. It’s surprisingly fun even when nobody gets clobbered! Ayse and I beat Ken and Jus, based mostly on one round where I immediately picked up everything she laid down.

Written: Holiday. Tomorrow for sure!

Happy Merry to all who celebrate!

I celebrated by doing nothing useful all day and then going over to Ayse and Ken’s to eat food and see people and admire Jus’s presents and stuff. Poor Nonny is pretty sick, but I risked the germs for companionship. Even Marith did!

Despite most of the food being carbs, my arm widget didn’t freak out. It’s almost like eating a real meal made of real food is better than microwaving one unit of Capitalism Chow. (Also, ham.)

Written: FAIL.

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.

For the first time in quite a while, I went over to Monkeycat Towers to play Minecraft. We didn’t do much, but it was fun anyway. Then we ate Frogmore Stew, which I guess is a regional variant of shrimp boil specific to one small island off the coast of South Carolina? It’s not actually stew, since the traditional method of serving is to pour it out onto a newspaper-covered picnic table and let the juice soak into the beach, leaving only Old-Bay-seasoned shrimp, sausage, potatoes, and corn to eat with fingers. It was definitely better than sitting at home in front of my computer all day.

Written: FAIL.