Pretty sure Thanksgiving food is not the route to longevity.
Everybody except Dave and I went back to San Jose today, because they have to prep the kids/be prepped for school on Monday. Dave and I stayed to play Martian Rails (I am so bad at Crayon Rail games) and Waterdeep with Undermountain (again), which meant we got to see Kate. I forgot how great Kate is, she pretends my jokes are funny! Went to bed around midnight again.
Read: VACATION
Written: VACATION
I did some of that! Also I bought nothing (possibly because I was far away from the computer I use for shopping, but it still counts).
Ate way too many waffles, admired Non’s racing game tracks (because it’s 2024 and kids can just construct 3D environments on their notepads), played Everdell with the tree replacement expansion and Settlers of Catan and Lords of Waterdeep (again) and Holiday Fluxx, ate too many leftovers, played SPANC again because Ayse didn’t get to play last time, managed to get to bed not long after midnight. I’m sensing some themes to this vacation.
Read: VACATION.
Written: VACATION.
Perfect that square! Square that perfection!
Got all the laminated things from Marith, surely I am now completely ready to run a game.
In the evening, we went to hear Lus in her school production (which was actually a community theater production with high school drama class as chorus) of Les Miserables. I understand we can’t demand too much of community theater, but I would like whoever was running sound that night to be sent to the labor camp in Jean Valjean’s place, because that was WAY TOO LOUD and also somehow screechy even when the manly men were singing their solos. (Jus was fine, of course.) My poor head.
Read: Delicious in Dungeon vol 7 (Ryoko Kui): Ninja bonding! Elf trouble! Senshi’s traumatic backstory!
Written: VACATION.
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.
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.
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.
Nightvale is one (1) years old today! That makes him a grown-up cat, not a kitten! He might still be kind of bb, though.
As usual after going into the office two days in a row, I am pretty blah, but I did a work and snuggled one or more cats.
Played: Ayse wants to play Minecraft together, so we spent some time tootling around the proposed seed in creative mode until everybody decided they like it. Someday, when we are not all busy with Easter, we will reboot it in survival mode and punch trees together.
Read: Edges (Linda Nagata): Start of a follow-on series to Deception Well and Vast and all those. One of the explorers returns home in a stolen ship, recruiting for an expedition back to the origins of humanity, where the people Deception Well left behind made Dyson spheres and then unmade them and now nobody knows what’s there. “The Inverted Frontier” is the title of the series.
Read: “The Speed of Time” (Jay Lake): Well, what do you expect, when members of your species listen to the voices from space?
Written: 226 words.
It seems weird for nations where pandas are not native to have a national panda day, but on the other hand, pandas!
I tried to get up at a sensible hour to do the thing, but the cats trapped me in bed until I fell back asleep. Alas.
After doing the thing, and then not doing any things for the whole afternoon, I went with Marith to see Jus in her school production of Annie Jr (ie, abridged). Singing! Dancing! Villainous plots! Propaganda for the morbidly wealthy! A happy ending! It was the last show, so Jus was full of feelings, but that’s okay. I hear it often happens to actors.
Read: Daisy Chainsaw (Charlotte Laskowski): Brutal tactical magical-girl combat. Choose your weapons from among such things as baseball bats, rollerblades, guns, microphones, and of course chainsaws, and try to survive high school until the villains attack and you have a transformation sequence and it’s time to fight. Still in a fairly primitive state, but it has a pixel-art aesthetic and magic rollerblades and dismemberment rules.
Written: 220, although some of it was adventure design that I did earlier but hadn’t logged.
Look, it’s 2024! Insert meme here.
I had to get up at 7 to be on call, which I was late for, and then I had a thing that needed attention right away so there was no going back to sleep. Eventually I got to stop being on call, which I was also late for. Not an auspicious start to the year!
In between, I at least got to play a little Minecraft with Ayse and Nonny. I haven’t played in a long time, it turns out.
Watched: Umbrella Academy 3.9-10: Pretty sure listening to Five is always more sensible than listening to any of the others, and this was no exception. Now the season is over and everything is ???WTF??? yet again, but next season allegedly will wrap it all up. I doubt it will resolve the discrepancies in scale, but all visual SF has to suffer from those, because all people with enough money to make a theatrical movie or Netflix show are complete morons.
Read: Strange Machines (ed Marissa Van Uden): I actually read this a while back but forgot to note it, so here it is. Subtitled An Anthology of Dark User Manuals, it is what it says on the tin. Stories include “A Brief Guide to Surviving a Human-Forced Reset”, “How to Install Organic Prostheses”, “Implementation of Eusocial Technologies in the Office”, and “How to Talk to Your Luvvbot-3000 about WWIV”. None of them are very long, so it’s more like the instructional blurbs from the backs of the boxes than actual manuals, but a lot of them are quite dark.
Written: 212 words. This actually is auspicious!
While I was on vacation, I saw a very cute baby who can stand up while holding onto things (which lets him get off the Baby Preserve), went on a three-mile hike with Ken and Dave, got help with Squaredle, ate a million unhealthy foods, saw many people I rarely see, and stayed up too late playing board games. I slept more than I wanted although not as much as my body wanted. It was a good vacation, but now, despite traffic, I am back. Marith did a great job taking care of Sage and Nightvale, because she is Best Lizard, but she was not in a position to feed them three gooshy meals a day, so they were glad to see me.
Played: Dominion. I did not win, although maybe I could have if the game had gone on longer.
Played: Ra. New to me, all about drawing tiles from the bag and bidding on them with numbers. As often happens, I seized the lead in the first epoch and then got no more points the rest of the game.
Played: Holiday Fluxx. Like all Fluxx variants, it is fundamentally Fluxx, and this is the rule of Fluxx.
Played: Puerto Rico. Moral depravity and I wasn’t even good at it! (Although neither was anybody else; it was a really close game and late at night.)
Played: Dungeon World. Jus wanted to play D&D, but nobody else volunteered and I wasn’t going to do that, so I compromised with an iron fist. An immolator, a rogue, a druid, and a wizard walk into a dungeon… and SET IT ON FIRE! Also there was some tussling with mooks and mutant frogs and traps, but by the time they got down to the heart of the dungeon, Jus had run out of gas. However, we stopped in a good place, and only had four players who are all likely to be up for gaming next visit, so I kept the character sheets and my terrible notes and maybe we’ll pick it up again.
Read: Perils & Princesses: You are fairy-tale princesses, going on D&D adventures. You have Resolve, Grace, Wit, a fairy godmother, a magic gift, one magic die per level(max four), and the contents of your inventory slots, because despite the fairy-tale theme, it’s a GLOG game. It has the usual D&D problems of “roll d20 to have nothing happen” and “everybody’s a bucket of hit points” but the system is simple and mostly player-facing. Also, because all lists and examples are numbered, it’s possible to create a character entirely randomly, which makes me want to try it for a con game.
Written: VACATION
As was foretold in prophecy, today was the day of traveling to visit the Pettersons.
I went back to my usual grocery store this week, which is next to my usual bookstore, which was full of things to buy, because I haven’t really converted to reading manga digitally, because I’m dumb. Also I ate chicken tenders to prepare my digestive system. I was on call in the afternoon to cover for coworker M who was trapped by the perfidy of automobiles, which boss B made a big deal of appreciating even though it was only for like 45 minutes.
In the evening, Ayse finally came over to meet my cats, and then we all* went to Brazil Meat Center (which is actually called Taurinus) for meat and more meat and grilled pineapple that tastes like peach pie and more meat and dessert because Marith hadn’t gotten a birthday celebration yet. Happy Lizard Day!
*Except Nonny who is sick and Dave who was keeping an eye on him and doesn’t like eating out much anyway.
Written: Still FAIL.
With the help of Ken and Jus and Nonny (heroes of the revolution, all), I managed to get some cats into my den of squalor (instantly rendering it 1000% cooler).
Nightvale (“Mostly void, partially stars”)
Sage (Named by Jus, for her greenish eyes)
They are so much younger and more rambunctious than any of my previous cats!
Sage is mostly teeth, partially even more teeth. Nightvale is 1000% more chill. Augh I have cats what if something happens to them? What if they happen to something? Augh!
Read: Buffomet (ed Nero O’Reilly, Iris Jay, Mia “Hye” Mardikian): A collection of sexy pictures of everyone’s favorite infernal androgyne and/or other demons (possibly goat-like), diabolists, etc. Turned out to mostly not be to my taste, alas.
Written: How can I write? I have cats to distract me!
I understood that reference!
No work today, only decompression and weekend stuff like grocery shopping. And birthday sushi with Jus! So much sushi. No, more sushi than that. Also cake. But I am glad everybody is done being sick and able to socialize and listen to my terrible con stories. There may have been hugs.
Read: “The Dragon Project” (Naomi Kritzer): Some people don’t deserve dragons.
Written: Writing down what I actually did over the extended weekend should be trivial, and yet it is using all my words (I don’t have very many).
It was a nice vacation. There was a baby, who is very cute and likes stealing glasses and saying “babababaabbbbaabababa”. There was air conditioning, so we did not die when it was 42C outside. There was the traditional Chinese food and grilled stuff and splashing in the pool. There was conversation. (Our hosts recently went to Japan and returned with tales.) There was a long stretch of sitting in cars, with a brief interruption to sit on folding chairs and watch fireworks at close range. (Nonny had a comment for each one, because he hasn’t seen a lot of fireworks.) There were board games. There were so many snacks. Eventually we got our act together and returned to San Jose.
Played: Everdell. We played this twice, so I have enough data to conclude that I am terrible at this game. I’d say the dual use of cards as discardable currency pushes it into Race for the Galaxy territory, but I’m sure that’s quite right. Mostly I’m just dumb. I’m sorry, cute forest creatures!
Played: Roll for the Galaxy. I came in second, which was also last.
Played: Pandemic. We also had the On The Brink expansion, but the extra roles didn’t save us. I came in last, along with all of humanity.
Played: Sagrada. I managed to get my tableau complete, but failed on all the victory conditions, so I came in last.
Watched: I totally thought I was going to do something useful when I got home, but instead I got chicken with too many bones and watched the start of a ridiculous anime called Estab Life. It’s the cyberpunk fantasy future, everybody has to live in their cultural burbclave, cute girl shadowrunners help them defect in pursuit of their unapproved dreams.
Written: FAIL. I had my laptop, and my current draft is in Dropbox, so I could have written, yet I did not. Pretty sure I can still make my overall goal, although this may not be my strongest week.
Zooming away to Roseville (which has not actually been in Roseville for quite a few years now). Someone told us there would be a baby.
We went to the park to see Jus’s Shakespeare camp production of Twelfth Night, Abridged Cowboy Version. Obviously she was brilliant, but also it was 897582 degrees outside so we all died and I didn’t come back to life until Marith came over for pizza and anime.
Watched: Mob Psycho 100 3.9-12: This time, Mob must face… his own heart! The end (of season 3).
Read: Micchi vs The New World vol 4 (Jammin’ Rabbit aka Tony Huo): We finally find out why the long-lost senpai of the main character has been doing all these terrible things, and everything is resolved. Also a lot of people get severely clobbered because seriously, don’t fuck with Micchi. The end.
Written: Only 176, but that’s more than my daily goal, and brings me to 1420 for the week, 6836 overall. More than 2/3 of the way to my 10-week goal!
Went to Shakespeare in the Park with Ayse & fam and Marith who is back from France. It was Twelfth Night, telenovela edition with dramatic music stings, so that was pretty fun.
Written: FAIL, the play went later than I expected.
Sorry, all father points are revoked upon becoming a Trump voter. I don’t make the rules.
Since there isn’t Sunday gaming for the next however long, and this would be an off week anyway, I swapped with somebody to take their oncall shift today. I think they’re a father or something. But the customers did not attack, so mostly I was useless all day.
We did some Minecraft in the afternoon. I mostly harvested cobwebs and vegetables from the abandoned village, and flailed about in caves looking for dripstone. I replanted the vegetables, but I have no idea if the cobwebs regenerate.
Read: Shadows of a Dying Sun (Alan Bahr): An OSRish game with several tables of dying-earth genre stuff, lots of resource tracks to manage, and an inexorable progression toward death instead of hit points per se. Also there’s an event where someone predicts that the world will end tomorrow and there’s a 10% chance they’ll be right.
Written: 144 tonight, 1734 for the second week, 3381 for both weeks so far.
Slept in until noon again, but then got up and went to automated sushi with Ayse and Jus and Nonny. We ate so many sushis! After that I did a lot of nothing, because I am very dumb.
Written: 124 words.
I got up and almost went grocery shopping, but then went back to bed instead. Social Minecraft is today because Nonny and everybody are busy tomorrow, so I can shop then.
This week, I explored the desert some more. It turns out to have two rivers, which may explain why I couldn’t find the riverside cave I found earlier. It also has at least two wells, which are pretty but mostly useless since thirst is not a thing, a bunch of cactus, and some suspiciously rectangular skylines that are not desert temples. I bought some custom banners from Nonny’s banner shop,which now has a colored sheep breeding program as part of its supply chain. After we finished, I went to my own world and finally found two cows to lead back to my paddock. Once my wheat crop comes in, I can make them smooch adorably and spawn new cows, and finally I will have a steady supply of leather for books.
I was on call all afternoon, but the customers were quiescent.
Read: Renegades (Craig Alanson): Immediately upon returning from their last expedition, the PCs have to steal their ship back from duly-constituted authority and set out to save Earth by doing the impossible. Again.
Written: 152. If only two points were enough to draw a line…
There’s no gaming, because Rachel is having Mother’s Day instead, so I was able to go grocery shopping and get a lunch and play Minecraft with Nonny and everyone (albeit remotely). I spent most of the session running around a desert (normal sand, so weird after the badlands of my primary world!) and exploring caves along the riverbank, but I was able to mine stuff so I can buy banners from Nonny and Ayse’s Banner Shop.
After we had to knock off group Minecraft, I splooted around in my own world (er, my copy of Marith’s world) and moved my sugarcane farming from the edges of the Dye Gardens (where stalks fall into the zmobie soup ocean) to the top of the mesa. I had to haul water up in buckets for it, but I don’t think it ended up being 52 buckets, which is nice.
Written: FAIL.
It’s the walk-a-thon at Nonny’s school, so I went to enjoy the breeze and hang out with people and eat a decent veggie burger and walk around a track. Then, since I was already way down that way and crossing the expressway to take the bus toward home would be a pain, I went to the Trader Joe’s that is dangerously near the Barnes and Noble and had a bookstore accident. It’s only once a year!
When I got home, I worked more on my grand orange terracotta hall, and also went looking for iron so I could make a pickaxe to mine out the gold ore cluttering up my side hall. It turned out the iron I thought I saw before was actually more gold, but eventually I found a cave that went down and down to where it had a little iron. It also had lapis and gold, so I need to go back at some point.
Watched: Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress 10-12 and movie 1: Finished the series, which ended about as well as could be reasonably expected, and then let autoplay roll over into the compilation movie to remind myself of the early stuff. It was about 30% shorter than a rewatch of the episodes.
Written: FAIL.
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.
Yay, I get to work from home again! But there’s still a multi-hour customer meeting every day and it looks like we’re going to continue next week.
Fortunately the meeting is in the morning, so I was able to skip out early to go see Jus perform in Once Upon A Mattress (clean middle-school version). There was singing! There was dancing! There was heteronormativity, but otherwise it was great all around! We will be able to say we knew famous actress Jus when she was just starting out!
Writing: FAIL.
Hm, my pad suddenly shut down and won’t start up or reboot even after charging for a while. That seems bad.
Ayse is feeling better, so I went with her & Ken & fam to Korean barbecue and became extremely full of meat. So much meat. My body is composed of at least 80% meat now.
Read: Katalepsis ch 2.7-12, 3.1-13, 4.1-7 (Hungry): Romance, rival magicians, assorted monsters both under the control of rival mages and not, terrifying extra-dimensional spaces, violence by means of magic, self-harm as a side effect of magic, more cute friends. All the important positive characters are women or at least female-identifying. I approve.
Written: Despite not having a pad to distract me, FAIL.
Finally it was time to see Jus on stage! It was a very abridged version of The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, but Jus got to be the off-screen voice of the housekeeper and also a skunk in Aslan’s army so she could fight the person she likes. No word on whether she got to drag them off to her lair. Good job, Jus!
When I tried to go to bed, I could not find my phone anywhere. Hopefully it is in Marith’s car and not on the theater floor or something.
Read: Vigor Mortis ch 136-174 (Thundamoo): Continuing transhumanism, mutation, soul editing, extradimensional assholes, super-evil viewpoint characters, super-evil antagonists, etc.
Written: FAIL.
I meant to get up early and voluntarily do a bit of work to finish up from yesterday but instead was a useless lump for the entire morning. Eventually I did get up and go to buffet and kittens with Ayse and Ken and Jus and Nonny. There were a lot of kittens, but although I spent a long time petting a purry grey boi named Howl (after the wizard, I presume) and getting my hand kneaded, none of them were the right kitten to come home with me.
Read: The Thousand Eyes (AK Larkwood): Sequel to The Unspoken Name, wraps everything up but not until after a lot of suffering and perseverance and even personal growth on the part of the main characters. Also, gay smooches.
Written: 705 kitten words. When I am caught up (if I ever manage that) maybe I will have enough brain cells to work on the thing I meant to NaNoWriMocate.