Tag: monkeycats

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.

I finally got my act together enough to go and see Jus play soccer! Her team did not win, but she did strike the sphere decisively with her foot. Also, based on her team name and colors and her uniform number, she is apparently some kind of witch monster, which comes as no surprise. I am terrible at yelling, because for all those years of school I only mouthed along with the cheering. Probably related to my inability to sing.

Avalon’s system is visiting Ayse, which was a little weird but not too awkward. We interacted like grownups and then went our separate ways.

After that, I accomplished nothing useful whatsoever.

Read: Did I Seriously Just Get Reincarnated as My Gag Character?! vol 1 (Kanade Otonashi): Sometimes isekai light novels are entertaining, but sometimes they are just full of grossness.

Written: 513 words, none of them NaNoWriMo.

Today’s event was minigolf with Nonny and Ken and Dave. It was very hot and I probably died of the sweatings, but it was fun. You can tell I didn’t play enough minigolf in my formative years, though.

Written: 682 kitten words, for a total of 4182/3000 this week and 44018/30000 for the whole challenge. I missed my quota the week of the corporate super-spreader event, but more than made it up with the other nine weeks. That’s technically a novel, almost a NaNoWriMo, and now I have a buffer of more than a month with kitten words, but I feel like I should have more to show for that many words.

I did not sleep as well this time, for no obvious reason. Too many people? Didn’t hydrate sufficiently yesterday? Minor sunburn through the remnants of my hair where the sunscreen didn’t take as well? Stars are wrong? But it’s going-home day, so whatever.

There was almost a board game, but Dave badgered me into eating a brunch instead, and then he helped Sherilyn reinstall her dishwasher, so everyone was occupied until Josh emerged to be sung at and becaked. He is now old enough that it means something when he refuses to buy beer for people! Not that any of his younger relations seem interested yet.

On the way home, I was too sleepy to entertain the driver, but despite this shameful dereliction of duty, we made it home in good time.

Then I was completely useless for the rest of the day.

Read: Cage of Souls (Adrian Tchaikovsky): A person from the last city in the world is sentenced to a fairly brutal prison where strange things happen, and reveals his backstory and world through flashbacks. It’s more similar to Gene Wolfe’s “Severian” books than to Vance’s “Dying Earth”, although not quite like either. It’s also surprisingly hopeful for Earth if not for humanity, given how much of a wreck the planet is.

Written: 797 words, which is not enough to make up for yesterday by itself, but is a good start.

I woke up on the first try again, and this time I got up right away! What is going on?!

Today I tried to learn One Deck Dungeon along with Ken and Jus but failed on the first set of doors, ate a bunch more food that was really tasty even if not metabolically appropriate, went swimming in a chilly pool with many splooshy children, played Among Us for the first time and did absolutely terribly at it, stood at the back deck admiring the night sky and its relative lack of fireworks, and stayed up until midnight playing Dominion.

I had nothing to do with it, but the jigsaw puzzle that was started before the pandemic has finally been finished.

Written: VACATION.

There was an available mattress, which might be why I slept much better than usual for a vacation. Or maybe it’s the new brain pills, or having something other than capitalism to get up for. Anyway, I was surprisingly functional.

Important vacation activities today: Playing Tomb of Annihilation (same engine as Castle Raveloft/Temple of Elemental Evil) with Ken and Jus, watching kids swim, eating grilled foods, playing Super Smash Bros with everybody, playing Lords of Waterdeep until midnight. I did so badly at Waterdeep that even Jus, playing for the first time after an exciting day of vacationing, beat me. This is because I am dumb, but I like playing Waterdeep anyway.

After smashing a bro, Nonny went to play Splatoon with Josh and Ollie and some online friend of theirs, and apparently stomped all over the three adult videogamers. To the point where the one who wasn’t local got on voice chat with him and wanted to know if he’s really nine. I tend to think poorly of Nonny a lot of the time because I mostly see him when he’s wound up and sleep-deprived and nine, but he really is great at video games.

Written: VACATION.

Everyone is covid-free, so we went to Roseville (no longer held in Rosevilla, CA)! As usual, I rode up with Ken, and we talked about gaming, listened to folk-punk music and Old Gods of Appalachia, stopped for horrifyingly greasy Mexican food, and didn’t die from traffic. We got there before the other car by like one minute, because they didn’t stop for anything.

The Petterson family has very exciting news, which you are probably not cleared for or I would have already told you. But it is all good news!

Heard much about Al’s Ptolus campaign, which is about to hit episode 100 and sounds like it has been a blast the whole way. I wish I could run something like that, but I don’t know how to do it without putting in all that work, and I’m not sure I could put that much work in even if I wanted to. Also I would probably need more reliable and interested gamers.

Dave and I finally bailed from the dying Empires & Puzzles alliance and went to Marith’s much more active alliance.

Played: Codenames.

Read: The Holy Grail of Eris vol 1 (Hinase Momoyama, Kujira Tokiwa, Yu-nagi): She’s a sincere but wallflowery noble girl, she’s the ghost(?) of someone executed for getting dumped by the prince. Together, they fight aristocratic intrigue.

Written: VACATION.

Waffled between getting up like a sensible person and sleeping in forever like a person on vacation, ended up kind of flopping around until it was time to go see the local production of that classic play, Buns In Verona. The best part was when Paris did the happy dance after being told he would get to marry Juliet, although the opening narration was well-delivered and Lord Montague was very impressive.

Tested negative for the rona, so if there is an expedition to Roseville tomorrow, perhaps I will get to go along.

Watched: Arcane 1-3: Interesting animation style, full of doom, reasonably coherent for something based on a video game, makes me think of Blades in the Dark.

Written: 452 kitten words, bringing me to 3438/3000 for the week. If we succeed in going to Roseville and I fail to write, I’m not doomed until next week!

Hey, look, I’m not on call! But the tickets that I worked on yesterday are coming back, so I feel guilty. Not guilty enough to log in to work, though I would have if the on-call person (who I think is New Coworker K today) asked. Instead I was pretty much useless all day.

Watched: Romeo and Juliet in the nearby park with Ayse and Ken and Marith and Jus and Nonny. It was a modern-dress production, and Romeo (as well as several other characters) were women. This didn’t work entirely well with the lines, so they still got referred to as “men” pretty often, but since nothing was changed otherwise, it was fine. Everybody died, including 7th-graders who had to listen to bawdy jokes.

Written: 259 kitten words, for a total of 3605/3000 this week.

Today I took time off work to eat buffet and see KITTENS with Ayse and Jus and Nonny. We ended up having to wait an hour for the kittens, because pandemic, but after a lot of escalators I got to pet a grey tuxedo kitten named Vixen, and had my fingers almost chewed off by a a kitten named Madden, and also petted a sleepy void kitten who never came out of their cave to let me read their collar. There were many fewer kittens this time than over the holidays, which made the visit less exciting, but it’s good to know so many kittens got homes.

Read: The Promised Neverland vol 20 (Kaiu Shirai, Posuka Demizu): The end! Also substantial denouement. Sometimes a redemption arc only takes a few pages.

Words: 875 kitten words. Also more scripting.

It looks like I might be able to import my old journal entries if I can convert them to XML of the right format, but right now that seems like a lot of work, so I’ll just start from today (okay, yesterday as I type this) with new entries.

Marith moved out yesterday (mostly) so I was only shopping for my own groceries, which was both less than usual and not as much less as I expected. I should probably still get food for her when everything is not confused, so that she does not die before getting a better job. Or maybe I should stay under my rock forever and never speak to her again. Difficult to tell which is the most diplomatic option.

We went over to Monkeycat Mountain to see friends because we are living in the future when such things are possible again! Instead of starting season 2 of Zoomwarts, though, we showed Jus Labyrinth. Being a child of her generation, her first question on seeing obvious male romantic lead was “…how old is he?” Good job being age-gap aware! She seemed to like the movie, though, and it gives me an extra week to figure out the doom of Zoomwarts.

Ken fed us vaguely Moroccan tomato fish, bacon cabbage, scallops, and rocket salad, which was all very good, and also did not make the robot spy on my arm unhappy, and we watched Yona of the Dawn 9-10. Yay, new party member! Marith had to leave after that, so she can get abused by capitalism before dawn tomorrow, so the rest of us played the Temple of Elemental Evil board game and successfully escaped despite Ken having accidentally shuffled the big scary monsters into the deck. Then I rode the bus home and was almost completely useless the rest of the evening.

Words: check.