Tag: office

Do Impossible Burgers and the like count? Because those are good.

Went into the office again, ate some chicken strips, did some work.

Read: The Wrong Dead Guy (Richard Kadrey): Further adventures of the hapless thief who got recruited by the Men in Black and cannot stay out of trouble. There are plenty of dead guys in these hijinks.

Read: Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End vol 2-3 (Kanehito Yamada, Tsukasa Abe): Frieren continues retracing the path of the quest to destroy the demon king, picks up another short-lived protege of one of her old party members, and reveals some of why she is utterly terrifying.

Played: Minecraft. To smooth out this lava lake, I’m going to have to scoop it all up and put it all back down, which is going to require a lot of buckets. Time to start branch mining at Y=+16, I guess!

Written: 217 of Big Bad Con adventure notes, since I had some thoughts. I should try to get it tested or something.

Check!

Because the office is closed on Thursday for Wellness Day and also there is no gaming tonight (Ken is on vacation), I went into the office today. It was not particularly more useful than not going to the office, but hopefully I get points for showing willingness. Ate a pizza, did a work, chatted with my boss because he’s here this week.

Read: I Married My Female Friend vol 2 (Shio Usui)

Read: Flying Witch vol 10 (Chihiro Ishizuka): That’s why I didn’t recognize the new characters in 11 and 12, because I hadn’t read 10 where they were introduced!

Played: Nothing, Ken is on vacation.

Written: 171.

 

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

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

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

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

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

Everybody likes otters, pretty much.

Went into the office, met my boss in person since he’s in town, ate a brisket sandwich, did a work.

Played too much Minecraft, didn’t even get that much sand.

Read: Glitch vol 3 (Shima Shinya): The plot thickens! Which is to say, the kids have gotten some explanation which may even turn out to be true, and now they know there’s time pressure.

Read: Witch Hat Atelier vol 12 (Kamome Shirahama): That’s a particularly distressing city-wide catastrophe! Also, this is going to have awful consequences for witch-mundane relations.

Written: 281. I’m not sure I like any of these words, though.

Turtles are good.

Went to the office even more tiredly, ate a pork curry that was surprisingly spicy for something delivered to a corporate office, did some work, butted into my coworkers’ conversations.

Read: Alpi the Soul Sender vol 3 (Rona): Finally, backstory about Alpi’s parents and the other soul sender! Also, mundanes being terrible.

Read: Flying Witch vol 11 (Chihiro Ishizuka): The level of magic in this series keeps getting higher and higher, and yet the characters are not any more serious.

Written: 189.

Also Canadian Immigrants Day, so one for Ken and one for me.

Went to the office, ate a barbecue pork sandwich, did a small amount of work.

Read: A Cat From Our World and the Forgotten Witch vol 2 (Hiro Kashiwaba): More people in the fantasy world are converted to cat lovers, as is only right and proper. It’s a pretty grim world, though, as bad as ours.

Read: The Everything Box (Richard Kadrey): A somewhat hapless thief in the magical crime underworld gets tapped to steal a box that everybody else also wants and hijinks ensue. Lots of hijinks, some murders, inept cultists, inept angels, secret government agencies, betrayal exes who inexplicably did not develop better taste in their time apart, etc.

Read: Otherside Picnic vol 9 (Iori Miyazawa, Eita Mizuno, Shirakaba): They are getting awfully blase about going to a dimension of death and fear. Surely that is going to continue to work out well for them. Also Sorawo might be coming to realizations.

Read: “We Travel the Spaceways” (Victor LaValle): Black magic realism, I guess? I liked it, but it was weird.

Read: Please Don’t Tell My Parents I’m A Giant Monster (Richard Roberts): Reread, because who doesn’t like a book about a disabled catgirl getting extra superpowers? I am still kind of waiting for the book from Claire’s PoV, though.

Written: 134.

If it were National Pickle Day, I’d presume it meant pickled cucumbers, but it’s international, so does that mean it includes other pickled items? Or is it just pickle imperialism?

Went to the office, ate a butter chicken, did a work.

Read: The Ancient Magus’ Bride vol 15 (Kore Yamazaki): This is apparently as far as I’ve ever read before, and also right about where we are in the anime. Everything after this will be new and surprising!

Read: What Feasts At Night (T Kingfisher): Sequel to What Moves the Dead, Alex Easton and their henchman encounter another creepy mystery, this time in their own homeland.

Written: 116.

If I baked, my course would be clear!

Went to the office, ate a pineapple curry, did a work.

Read: The Ancient Magus’ Bride vol 13-14 (Kore Yamazaki): College arc continues with the field trip and the mysterious attacks, very much like the anime.

Read: The Dragon’s Soulmate is a Mushroom Princess! vol 3 (Hanami Nishine, poporucha): Finally we learn what the deal is with the mushrooms and the FL’s mysterious past and everything.

Read: “Fire Above, Fire Below” (Garth Nix): This seems familiar, but it’s not on my reading list so it must have been some other story about dragons and firefighters that I read?

Read: “The Necessary Arthur” (Garth Nix): “Against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain,” or in more modern terms, being a post-human entity of unfathomable power doesn’t mean you aren’t also a complete fuckup.

Written: 294. See, this is what makes me think I could increase my quota to 250.

Apparently not all the socks turned loose on No Socks Day are able to survive in the wild. Sniff!

Went to the office instead of sleeping, ate some Indian food, did a work that was not as annoying as yesterday, caught up on journaling.

Read: The Ancient Magus’ Bride vol 9 (Kore Yamazaki): Conclusion of the Cartaphilus arc! That is how he came to be in the place doing the thing in the College arc.

Written: 355?! That’s almost more than zero! Not really, but almost!

Donkeys rarely wear socks. However, I had to wear socks today because they go with my shoes for going into the office. Ate a pretty okay salad, did a work, tried to wrangle livestock in Minecraft. This did not result in any explosions, but I lost one of the two leashes I got from boating llamas and then all my chickens got away because it doesn’t work to put the ungulates in with them. Also made some obsidian so I can make a nether portal if I feel motivated someday.

Read: The Ancient Magus’ Bride vol 7-8 (Kore Yamazaki): Jealousy! Kidnapping! Bad monster! And that’s how Chise got her arm, which I had forgotten the details of.

Written: 162

And yet, my cats still don’t seem to like seafood. Which is legit, it’s not like their ancestors were out there hunting tuna! I guess a bobcat could hunt salmon or trout? Probably not as effectively as rabbits, though.

Went to the office, ate a kind of cold and soggy Reuben, did a work.

Read: The Ancient Magus’ Bride vol 2 (Kore Yamazaki): Still zipping right along with Chise and her lack of survival instincts in the deep end.

Written: 140.

AKA Labor Day everywhere that’s not a blighted capitalist hellscape (and some places that are, I guess).

I’m the only one who goes into the office on Wednesdays, so I went in even though we had an early-morning meeting. I had to commute on the bus since the train doesn’t run very frequently outside of rush hour, but it wasn’t too much slower. Ate a Korean bento thing, did a work.

Read: Ogami-San Can’t Keep It In vol 4 (Yu Yoshidamaru): Oh no, it’s the hot childhood friend! Who is also immune to the male lead’s quirk, to add insult to insult.

Read: The Ancient Magus’ Bride vol 1 (Kore Yamazaki): Rereading from the very beginning because I didn’t remember much of it, but I do remember it now that I’m reading it, and also how fast it moved at the beginning. Halfway through the first volume and they’re already in Ulthar!

Written: 132.

I approve of both, although I have not seen a lot of crossovers.

Went to the office, ate a beef curry with green papaya, did a work.

Read: #DRCL: Midnight Children vol 2 (Shin’ichi Sakamoto): More hauntings, ghastly apparitions, madness, and a pretty extra Van Helsing.

Read: Witch of Thistle Castle vol 1 (John Tarachine): This is the same genre as Ancient Magus’ Bride, but the OP teenager is a boy sent to live with a London witch. Also he seems kind of gay for the cute French boy.

Read: Lieutenant Fusilier in the Farthest Reaches (Erika Chappell): It’s the British Army in the days of buying commissions, except it’s in space and all the troops are robots. Our dashing lesbian lieutenant is one of the extremely few robots to purchase an officer’s commission. Colonialism and class divides are explicitly addressed, although maybe not resolved in ways that are satisfying to modern sensabilities. Also, gay robot lady!

Written: 234. I think.

No thank you.

Went to the office, ate a salmon poke bowl, did a work.

Read: Daemons of the Shadow Realm vol 4 (Hiromu Arakawa): Yep, everybody is conspiring. Also, some daemons are just plain mean.

Read: Please Don’t Tell My Parents I Saved the World Again (Richard Roberts): Ninth in the series, back to the bi poly high-school necromancer. She makes a new friend who, unfortunately, comes with a lot of baggage (but does not want to join her harem).

Read: Komi Can’t Communicate vol 29 (Tomohito Oda): It is simultaneously the beach episode, hot springs episode, and stupid-games-for-high-stakes-because-idiots-are-in-charge episode. But Komi can actually communicate, at least well enough to defend her boyfriend!

Written: 187 but also some journal.

I hope everyone is aware of all nearby velociraptors at all times!

Went to the office again, sat on the phone with a customer, ate a falafel and a hummus.

Read: #DRCL vol 1 (Shin’ichi Sakamoto): Despite the hashtag octothorpe in the title, it is set in Victorian England and the height of technology so far is the typewriter. It is an extremely cracktastic, possibly even hallucinatory, boarding-school AU of Dracula with alternate personalities, crazy foreigners, excessive interpersonal drama, the first girl at the boy’s school, inexplicable supernatural weirdness, and general bizarre creepiness.

Read: The Remarkable Journey of Coyote Sunrise (Dan Gemeinhart): A twelve-year-old girl and her dad travel the country ina  converted schoolbus after the rest of their family has died, never talking about the past or going back to their old hometown, until Coyote hears of something she has to get home for on a tight deadline, and hatches a Cunning Plan. Emotional roadtrip hijinks ensue.

Written: 213.

I don’t recall interacting with the librarians much, but the one at my first high school would let us hang out in the library and invent space wargames during pep rallies.

Yay bats! Bats are great!

Went to the office, ate Mayan-Chinese fusion cuisine (Pollo Pibil Bao) and felt very futuristic.

Read: Monthly in the Garden With My Landlord vol 1-2 (Yodokawa): A manga editor breaks up with her girlfriend, looks for a new place to live, finds a house that is suspiciously cheap and turns out to come with an eccentric yet beautiful live-in landlady, lesbian hijinks ensue. The landlady’s colorful past is a big deal.

Read: Magilumiere Magical Girls Inc vol 1 (Sekka Iwata, Yu Aoki): Monsters randomly appear in future Tokyo, transforming technomagical heroines to exorcise them are big business, a college grad with no talents except pluck and speed-reading and eidetic memory falls in with a magical girl startup company populated entirely by weirdos, life-threatening hijinks ensue.

Written: 119.

Now Sage is also one year old! She is extremely bb for such a grownup cat.

Went back to the office, ate eggplant stir-fry, did a work. First day this year I have not felt the need for a jacket.

Read: Sheeply Horned Witch Romi vol 2 (Yoichi Abe): The world is completely different again, fragments of the boy’s personality are looking for fragments of the witch’s personality to reassemble, but this may not be as straight-forward as hoped, and the results might not be entirely positive.

Read: Wartorn Stars (Glynn Stewart): Having reached the stars of the aliens who need help, the humans save as many days as they can, which is not all of them, but enough to get acclaim from the aliens and their allies, and also find out a lot of confusing things about the enemy.

Read: Dai Dark vol 2 (Q Hayashida): Finally the main character and his skeletal buddy have their own creepy spaceship so they can fly around looking for trouble meatball spaghetti and bones.

Written: 176.

You can do it, young writers! Don’t listen to the haters! Especially not if the hater is you!

Went to the office, ate a barbecue, did a work. Got an urgent customer call at the end of the day, but was able to make the customer happy by quitting time.

Read: Sheeply Horned Witch Romi vol 1 (Yoichi Abe): Rereading, because I tried to start vol 2 and had no idea what was going on. Depressed high-school girl gets the power to reshape the world into the metaphor of her psyche, the only person who isn’t in a coma is the boy she likes, at the end she’s entering a new instar or something. Right!

Read: Dai Dark vol 1 (Q Hayashida): There’s a teenaged kid in a wacky grim space setting full of disgustingly organic tech and necromancy, he has a skeletal life-support back, everyone is hunting him because they think his bones will grant any wish, ultra-violent space hijinks ensue.

Read: Raven’s Flag (Glynn Stewart): Number 6(?) in the series about trying to put together the remains of the alien empire that was just overthrown, starting a new arc where aliens from far across the old empire have come to ask humanity for help because they are getting their asses handed to them by mysterious attackers.

Written: 165.

 

I count, at least according to my HR profile.

Went to the office, ate a deep-dish pizza, did a work.

Read: I Married My Female Friend vol 1 (Shio Usui): Marriage is something everybody should try, so two friends agree that if they aren’t otherwise attached by five years after college graduation, they’ll marry each other, and they do. One of them is obviously much more into this than the other, at least initially, but there is affection and cuteness.

Read: God Bless the Mistaken vol 1 (Nakatani Nio): In a world where the laws of nature are always making an exception (giant plants growing everywhere, then the plants disappear and people can walk on air, then people are earthbound and everything is mirror-reversed), a high-school boy runs errands for his landlady who studies the glitches. I have trouble believing a society so much like ours could happen in such a world, but it’s cute.

Written: 309. This is working better.

I told them how beautiful and chompy they are, instead of reminding them that their brains are the size of walnuts, so I’ll count this one.

Went to the office, got almost the last desk, ate some Chinese(?) food, did a work. I’m not sure how this is going to work when the whole company is supposed to be in the office on Thursdays.

Read: Blood Blade vol 1 (Oma Sei): Vlad the Impaler returned to life as a cute young vampiress and protected her corner of Eastern Europe for hundreds of years until steampunk mad scientists send their minions to annoy her. Ultraviolence ensues. No, I don’t think it’s supposed to make more sense than that.

Read: Whoever Steals This Book vol 1 (Nowaki Fukimidori, Kakeru Sora): Book-hating youngest member of a famously book-loving clan discovers that when people steal books from her family’s private library, they get cursed, and she’s the curse. Adventures in surreal book worlds ensue, with a helpful dog-girl-spirit-thing.

Written: 428 terrible words.

HI JUS!

Went to the office, ate some Ethiopian mushrooms and injera, did a work, came back home.

Read: Soara and the House of Monsters vol 1 (Hidenori Yamaji): After spending her entire life training to fight monsters, Soara goes to sign up on the very day the war is cancelled. Distraught, she wanders the wilderness until she falls in with a band of dwarves who are going around doing bespoke construction for monsters who want to use this new human idea and live in houses instead of found dens. Very much the sort of manga with double-page spreads of the monster houses with the fantasy materials and monster-specific features called out. Soara’s character arc is obviously going to be learning to value herself for anything other than monster-killing power.

Read: Free Period (Ali Terese): Two middle-school troublemakers get sentenced to do something constructive with their energy, and end up coopted into/coopting the project to get period supplies in all bathrooms. It’s like 50% period equity, 50% nobody knows what to do with these girls who have so much energy, and 20% fart jokes. Having never been a middle-school girl, I have no idea whether this is accurate, but it seems plausible.

Read: Blade of the Moon Princess vol 3 (Tatsuya Endo): Look, it’s another faction on the Tainted World, and they also have a grudge against the Imperial family. What were the odds of that?

Written: 279, although maybe I should have written less and gone to bed earlier.

Yay me, I guess? I could have justified taking the day off work, and in fact should have since I have twenty days of vacation to use up this year, but instead I went to the office and ate beef and eggplant and fried rice and helped some customers.

Read: She Professed Herself Pupil of the Wise Man vol 1 (dicca*suemitsu, Ryusen Hirotsugu, fuzichoco): VR game, can’t log out, but the best summoner in the game is flung thirty years into the future and stuck in the girly avatar he was fiddling with as an alt to his Srs Bzns Elder Sage avatar. Now there’s one or more wars coming, his buddy who lived through the entire thirty years has spurred a military-industrial revolution, etc. Feels very choppy, probably because it’s only taking the high points from the original light novels and isn’t meant to stand on its own.

Read: My Happy Marriage vol 1 (Akumi Agitogi, Rito Kohsaka, Tsukiho Tsukioka): So far very similar to the anime. Maybe we’re getting lore in different spots, but it’s the same lore. Maybe the trip to town went differently? Or maybe what I’m remembering is from a later trip. Anyway, Miyo-ella and her horrifying abusive family and her beautiful fiancé.

Read: Cascade Failure (LM Sagas): It does successfully have some A Long Way To A Small Angry Planet found-family energy, but it’s all betrayals and murder plans instead of interspecies romance. The world-building is not great, planets are bigger than that, which means slower; no future character ever needs to make more than a single C20 cultural reference per series in which they appear; and even though we here in 2024 are in a consolidation phase of the capitalist hellscape, I am dubious about a single megacorp owning the entire galactic arm. On the other hand, I stayed up until a million o’clock at night to finish it.

Written: 130 more of adventure, the parts the PCs wouldn’t see if they sat in town instead of engaging with the adventure. Seems unlikely they’ll do that in practice, although I really need to test it before taking it to a con. For a change.

Thus implying all Hufflepuffs are atheists, which as we know from Yes, Prime Minister is completely consistent with a career in the Anglican clergy.

Went to the office, ate a chicken pot pie, helped some customers.

Read: The Splendid Work of a Monster Maid vol 1 (Yugata Tanabe): A beloved cat learns to assume human form, but alas her human has died, so she goes to the Monster World to find work and falls in with spy-maids working for the deposed demon king. Wacky hijinks ensue, with remarkably little fan service for a manga about three monster girls in maid outfits.

Read: The Queer Girl is Going to Be Okay (Dale Walls): Three queer girls in Texas, trying to survive their senior year of high school despite Texas and families, one of them is making the eponymous documentary as her only chance at getting enough scholarship to not be stuck caring for her disabled father forever.

Read: Quality Assurance in Another World vol 1 (Masamichi Sato): VR game, can’t log out, except the protagonist is not a player but a playtester, and the only one still doing his job instead of using debug mode to enslave the locals. The extremely primitive programming paradigm they’re testing isn’t consistent with full-immersion VR and at least semi-sapient AI, which makes it hard to take any of it seriously.

Written: 118 of default timeline for the Big Bad Con adventure.

Are you Kenough?

Getting up early to commute in to the office was only a little worse than usual, because I already hate it. Did some work, finally ate goat curry with basmati rice (third time lucky!). Turns out I don’t like goat that much, at least not bone-in, but it’s good to eat different things.

Read: The Illustrated Guide to Monster Girls vol 1 (Suzu Akeko): Unlike basically every other manga about monster girls, it’s not all fan service. In fact, it’s not any of that kind of fan service, but it’s a lot of violence (against characters who regenerate, and are terrible people anyway, so whatever) and evil school hijinks.

Read: Alpi the Soul Sender vol 2 (Rona): Alpi meets another Soul Sender, who is older, better trained, and prettier, and also taunts her with information about her parents that she’s searching for. Surely they will become friends eventually.

Written: 129 again. There aren’t that many numbers that are between 100 and bedtime, I guess.

I probably did some kind of math today!

Also went to the office and ate a burrito.

Read: Witch Hat Atelier Kitchen vol 2 (Hiromi Sato, Kamome Shirahama): More recipes and fanfic vignettes.

Read: The Scapegracers (HA Clarke): A sullen teenaged lesbian witch is surprised to find that her people are the popular girls at school, but they really are, even in the face of creepy patriarchal witch hunters and hot lesbian betrayal and really visceral magic. Made me realize I don’t know how to write characters who have either feelings or bodies, never mind both at the same time.

Written: 119, somehow.

Another day I have failed to celebrate!

Went to the office, ate a Mediterranean hamburger wrap thing, did a work.

Read: Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou omnibus 1 (Hitoshi Ashinano): This is one of Dave’s favorites from ages back, which I never managed to read in scanlation, but now it is available at bookstores in English! It is some days in the life of a robot girl running a cafe during the last days of humanity. Written in the 90s, the fading civilization is not very futuristic, despite bits like human-level robots and perpetual streetlights, but the quietness and the fading are the important parts. I quite like it, but it is the opposite of exciting.

Read: The Invisible Man & His Soon-to-Be Wife vol 3 (Iwatobineko): More mushiness, still no steaminess. Probably at least another three volumes before they can manage more than a kiss, even though they have the good example of other couples to inspire them.

Written: 121, mostly copying stuff from a first draft into a notes for a second draft.

Excellent day for Gilbert & Sullivan heroes to be born!

Went into the office, was dumb, ate a cold Impossible burger, did a work.

Read: The Moon on a Rainy Night vol 3 (Kuzushiro): Protagonist has finally realized her feelings. Surely this will bring her only happiness with her beautiful girlfriend.

Written: 225 words of gaming notes, since I finally had ideas for the Perils & Princesses adventure for next Big Bad Con, or maybe it’s better to say the ideas I had started to fit together.

Another day that should be every day.

I did go into the office today, and ate Korean bento or something close to it. Then came home and tried to attend a late meeting about the new product I’m supposed to support, but apparently it was cancelled with no notice. Bah.

Read: Alpi the Soul Sender vol 1 (Rona): Nature spirits don’t die often, but when they do, their bodies are cursed until they’re given proper funerary rites, so the main character travels around doing that and dealing with other spirit-related problems, along with her butler(?). Humans make a lot of spirit-related problems.

Written: 128.

Yes, hippos are great! Best animal ever! 14/10, would import to different continents again! (Do you think that’s enough to keep them from murdering me?)

Went to the office, tried to learn a thing, ate some barbecue (I like barbecue, I’m probably doomed), tried to learn another thing, came home.

Read: Bloody Sweet vol 2 (NaRae Lee): Magic potential and a vampire in her closet don’t stop our MC from being bullied at school, but she deals with it pretty well, possibly because her emotional support vampire is full of wise advice.

Read: There’s No Freaking Way I’ll Be Your Lover! Unless… vol 4 (Musshu, Teren Mikami, Eku Takeshima): Our MC is now being fought over by two beautiful top-of-the-class girls, and there seem to be more waiting for their chance. She complains a lot, but she’s definitely doing something right.

Written: 120.