Tag: office

Made it into the office, did some work, ate some greasy “East-Coast-style” pepperoni pizza, made it back home without getting rained on excessively. I guess that was a successful day?

Read: The Witches’ Marriage vol 2 (Studio Headline): Further interactions between the earnest young witch and her partner the sexy older tsundere witch. Other witches butt in, there are magical mishaps, they go to Witch Marriage School and have a beach episode, etc.

Read: Have Sword, Will Travel (Garth Nix, Sean Williams): A sketchy magic sword drafts a boy who doesn’t want to be a knight, and his friend who would much rather be a knight but is spurned by the sword. Adventure and multiple villainous plots that need foiling ensue, and maybe the kids aren’t terrible at knighting after all.

Read: Candy & Cigarettes vol 4 -5 (Tomonori Inoue): Miharu’s tragic backstory, and then it’s off to America, because that’s where they keep the massive gun battles and desolate wastelands.

Written: 253. I came up with a better cliffhanger, although I’m not sure how the MC can possibly get out of it. Maybe that means it’s the right choice.

We have always celebrated World Hypnotism Day. It is the best holiday. You should celebrate it too. Join us.

More beeping and cats to help me sleep, more going to the office, more sleepiness in the afternoon. Today I had some kind of Mayan pork and roasted vegetables thing for lunch, which was pretty good and also did not make my arm widget freak out. I also ate a dinner of carbs and stuff, so hopefully there will not be any beeping tonight.

Read: Secrets of the Silent Witch vol 2 (Tobi Tana, Matsuri Isora, Nanna Fujimi): Continued undercover magic school intrigue, with bonus accounting.

Read: The Luis Ortega Survival Club (Sonora Reyes): A mostly-mute autistic high school and her friends have had it with rapist-boy and aren’t going to let him get away with that shit any more.

Read: Candy & Cigarettes vol 3 (Tomonori Inoue): Ah, the “captured and forced to do a job for the bad guy” arc.

Written: 205.

But I slept poorly, because my arm widget decided to beep annoyingly at me during the night. I guess I didn’t eat enough dinner? But I got up and went to the office anyway. The train was a mess because at-grade crossings are still somehow a thing, but because my new route is so much better, I was only like five minutes late. Did some works, got very sleepy, ate half a tandoori chicken pizza for lunch (didn’t seem to upset my arm widget at all, so I guess thin crust was the right choice), did some gross shell scripting to find out the shape of a customer’s doom. Despite being sleepy at work, I was very productive for a brief period when I got home, instead of immediately lapsing into torpor. Not sure how that happened.

Read: Candy & Cigarettes vol 2 (Tomonori Inoue): Further morally-questionable exploits of the 5th-grade assassin and retired cop as they work to take down the criminal mastermind through extrajudicial murder.

Read: Light From Uncommon Stars (Ryka Aoki): A runaway trans girl, a diabolist violin teacher, and interstellar refugees cross paths in the Asian-American community of modern-day Los Angeles. It is very much about trans and refugee and violin star and demon servant experiences and trying to build new lives. I liked it, but

Read: Secrets of the Silent Witch vol 1 (Tobi Tana, Matsuri Isora, Nanna Fujimi): A high-level witch with social anxiety  so severe she had to invent silent spellcasting to avoid talking (and maybe on the spectrum as well?) has to go undercover at magic school to protect the crown prince. Hijinx ensue.

Written: 139, which is trending in the wrong direction but still valid.

Ovodiablerism is the best!

However, office lunch was Nepalese(?) which included two or more types of paneer plus garlic naan(ish) and no deviled eggs. Still good!

Read: Dandadan vol 5 (Yukinobu Tatsu): Another bizarre encounter with cryptids and cultists and aliens, most of them dumb or horny or both.

Read: Omega Morales and the Legend of La Lechuza (Laekan Zea Kemp): A twelve-year-old from a magical family but with defective(?) magic of her own and her annoying cousin and friendly ghost are stalked by an owl-witch-monster and also annoying middle-schoolers and racist buttheads and family that is not as helpful as they think. It’s hard being twelve.

Read: Me and My Beast Boss vol 1 (Shiroinu): A human (and therefore marginalized) office lady gets promoted to work with the terrifying lion-guy CEO, who is terrifying but also appreciates her abilities. Possible romance!

Written: Still FAIL.

Nailed another one!

Office lunch was Chick-Fil-A, which was not healthy, but also not that great (not even counting the homophobia thing). Cold fries.

Read: The Cruel Stars (John Birmingham): It has the buzzwords for modern SF, neural augmentation, space-time manipulation, a little Eclipse Phase (bioconservatives vs transhuman civilization), some Culture (obnoxious hovering ship AIs), but the SFnal elements don’t quite stick together, not even counting “geostationary orbit over the northern hemisphere”. Hundreds of years of enormous AIs should have made things weirder, IMHO. But I guess milSF is always like that.

Read: Life With an Ordinary Guy Who Reincarnated Into a Total Fantasy Knockout vol 1 (Shin Ikezawa, Yu Tsurusaki): On the upside, “total knockout” doesn’t mean breasts bigger than her head, and people struck by her beauty propose marriage or worship her as a goddess. However, massive heteronormativity (the whole schtick is because the leads could not recognize their feelings for each other if they were both men), and the MTF lead seems pretty young for all those offers of marriage.

Written: FAIL. Will I ever write anything again ever?

Slime for everyone!

I guess I did a better job of sleeping, so I was up to my usual level of uselessness.

Office lunch was “acai bowl with nuts”, which was some kind of superfood berry frogurt with granola and banana slices, or something. I ate it, but I feel no need to repeat the experience. It might have been cursed.

Read: Kings, Queens, and In-Betweens (Tanya Boteju): A queer teenager struggles with crushes on various girls, her self-perception as completely boring and lame, other people’s trauma, inability to hold her liquor, a missing mother, and the possibilities of drag.

Read: Blade of the Moon Princess vol 1 (Tatsuya Endo): The violent, unrefined teenaged princess of the Moon Kingdom gets stranded on Earth while escaping a coup and must try to not be a terrible person under difficult, even ridiculous, circumstances. Has a similar mix of violence and humor to Spy x Family, unsurprisingly.

Read: Hitomi-chan is Shy With Strangers vol 6 (Chorisuke Natsumi): Further adventures of the tall, busty, shark-toothed frosh and her shrimpy sempai. It’s okay, but I don’t know that I need to read much more of it.

Written: FAIL.

And yet, I work in software. There is no ethical production under capitalism, or something.

Office lunch was burritos, so that was okay, or at least more interesting than I would have eaten at home. Also there was a lot of capitalism.

Read: With a Golden Sword (Rachel Aaron): Everybody’s favorite glob of faerie magic continues to defeat the asshole blood mage, but he has so many plans and allies that he takes a lot of defeating. She also finds out more about how she came to be what she is, which I would appreciate more if I remembered the magic system better.

Read: Witch Hat Atelier vol 3-4 (Kamome Shirahama): The second test, where we see some of why the ancient forbidden magic is so very forbidden, but the new witches solve problems with compassion and slightly less regard for the letter of the law than some might prefer.

Written: FAIL.

Nope, I fail at this one. I used to bring them to gaming sometimes.

Office lunch was salad again, sheesh.

Read: Aru Shah and the Nectar of Immortality (Roshani Chokshi): This is the volume where Aru and the rest have to come back from rock bottom to win the final battle. The end!

Read: Witch Hat Atelier vol 1-2 (Kamome Shirahama): It could be cute witches doing cute things, but there are conspiracies and ancient forbidden sorcery.

Written: I fail at this too. Maybe I should go back to writing about my teddy bears.

Teachers are in fact awesome, they probably deserve several days.

The bus did not show up when I expected it again, although the VTA website says it should have. Is it just getting cancelled for some reason? I guess I will have to check ahead of time next week.

Office lunch was Oktoberfest sausage and pretzels and sauerkraut. So many sausages. It was pretty great. The office itself was less great, being full of humans and their virus-spewing faceholes.

Read: Otherside Picnic vol 5-6 (Iori Miyazawa, Eita Mizuno, Shirakaba): It seems like they are figuring things out, but they are also slipping into the otherside more and more easily. Will they understand the otherside before being lost entirely? Is there a difference between those?

Written: 353 from the last time I counted up, which was sometime before the con. Whatever, that’s the word count I’m at now, even though hardly any of it was written tonight.

I’m falling down on the job! But not as much as VTA did when I went into the office this morning.

Office lunch was packaged supermarket sandwiches, which is what I normally eat for lunch, so a complete bust as far as bribery to commute.

Read: Otherside Picnic vol 3-4 (Iori Miyazawa, Eita Mizuno, Shirakaba): More otherside, less picnic! Unless by “picnic” you mean “hallucinatory terror”. Also drama, because none of these people is sensible and all of them are under a lot of stress.

Written: FAIL, but at least finished my con report. Tomorrow for sure! maybe.

Sounds anti-capitalist to me!

Gave Penzey’s gift cards to my coworkers. I don’t think they knew what to think, but whatever. Also ate empanadas and fixed some customers.

Read: Otherside Picnic vol 2 (Iori Miyazawa, Eita Mizuno, Shirakaba): Our heroines end up in the Otherside again, naturally against all nature and reason, and find some other humans stuck there. This is probably going to go even more terribly than expected.

Read: Call the Name of the Night vol 1 (Tama Mitsuboshi): A cute young girl with a night-related curse and pet shadows lives with a cute doctor who is trying to take care of her. Other people cause problems, but not insoluble ones. The pet shadows are cute.

Written: 207.

I’ve spent 364 days practicing for this!

Office is still there, unfortunately, and had fairly mediocre sandwiches (unlike the terrifying ham-cheese-bacon-pasta sandwiches of yesterday which I missed out on). Open-plan offices are the worst in every way, business executives should never be allowed to make decisions about anything.

Read: Murder on a School Night (Kate Weston): An anxious high-school and her crazed best friend try to solve some mysteries in modern rural England, which explicably involve a lot of period products and also a lot of patriarchy that needs smashing. Not sure about the face turn near the end, but it still makes me think my teenaged characters aren’t crazed enough.

Read: Daemons of the Shadow Realm vol 2 (Hiromu Arakawa): This volume was pretty much two fight scenes, but we got to see some more daemons. I hope we start finding out about the horrors of the world like we did with FMA.

Written: FAIL.

And that’s what was for lunch at the office, so I win. Although there was a customer call in the middle of it, so also I lost. The weekly training meeting has returned, although it won’t be weekly most of the time, so I remembered that I need to shut up and let other people talk more.

Had to get my neck ultrabeeped after work, results to follow next week. It would be nice if they found a fixable thing, I guess.

Written: 236.

You know, if we just mulched the billionaires, it would do a lot more for threatened species than having an obscure day. Just saying.

Back in the office today, ate a lot of fancy salad, did some works. Casualties were light.

Read: Winter’s Gifts (Ben Aaronovitch): American adventure with horrifying weather and history and general Americanness. Special Agent Reynolds is just not as interesting a character as Peter, though.

Written: 262.

Kind of late on that one, oh well.

I did some works in the office, and also ate a sandwich, so I guess that was okay, but still a waste of time and energy.

Read: Deep Navigation (Alastair Reynolds): Collection of short stories from the 90s and 00s, only one of them in the “Revelation Space” universe, but all full of SF doom.

Read: The Year My Life Went Down The Toilet (Jake Maia Arlow): A 7th-grader who already has to deal with being gay and her grownups being mortifying and her best friend getting a new interest is also diagnosed with IBS. She doesn’t deal with it well, but it’s really a lot.

Written: FAIL.

Apparently everybody thinks I’m the bee’s knees for getting that customer working yesterday, so that’s good. Not so much meeting today; I was able to get other stuff done, which was nice. Also not betrayed by the train this time.

Written: FAIL. Brain, why?

Sadly, we had burritos at work. Also customer calls. So much customer call. We got one customer working again, though. Then the train was very late, so I had extra customer call from the station while waiting.

Read: Heart of Malice (Lisa Edmonds): A magic PI with an extremely traumatic past gets zorched by magic a lot. Also there’s a hot werewolf guy and a sketchy vampire guy and some kind of mystery.

Written: FAIL.

Went to the office, didn’t die, still a lot of customers.

Spent the commute making notes on how to turn Champions into something that isn’t even slightly like Champions. None of my ideas are consistent with each other, and none of them would work on their own.

Written: FAIL. Have I lost momentum? Or do I just hate capitalism?

Obviously not a very important holiday, right?

Back to the office, it was not any better or any worse to have teammates there. We learned about the upcoming release, which will obviously be the best thing ever, ate pasta, and did not die. Commute still okay.

Read: A Half-Built Garden (Ruthanna Emrys): Aliens show up and are all like, “Oh good we got here before your planetary ecosystem collapsed entirely! Come with us if you want to live, which of course you do!” and the anarcho-environmentalist humans are like, “It still needs a little work, but we’re not abandoning our homeworld just because you did.” Negotiation and cultural exchange and internal conflicts ensue. It’s a good solarpunk future, though.

Read: “Compulsory” (Martha Wells): Unsatisfyingly short Murderbot vignette.

Read: “Detonation Boulevard” (Alastair Reynolds): Cyborgs race across Io’s hellscape in nuclear trucks, and capitalism ruins everything.

Read: The Secrets of Insects (Richard Kadrey): Horror short story collection, with a few pieces from the “Sandman Slim” universe, but mostly serial killers/cultists/monsters (not well-delineated categories). Some people get theirs, but it’s almost always the greater of two evils that remains.

Written: 200/734/13204.

Finally went to the new office, completely forgetting there was an all-hands meeting during commute time, so I ended up sitting out back for an hour listening on the phone before finally experiencing the new very small space. I don’t care about not having my own desk, but having too many humans breathing the air is annoying. Lunch delivery is the same.

Overall, the commute is a lot better, because it’s one leg shorter.

Written: 269/534/13004.

Office, with burgers. Since this is our last week in this office, I piled a bunch of stuff into a sack to bring home, where I will probably throw it away.

I found my copy of the Nimona comic, which I still had, but looking through my storage room did not really reduce my urge to throw everything into the sea.

Written: 388 words again. I guess the range of possible values there is small enough that a repeat isn’t that surprising. 776 words for the week, 8785 overall.

Went to the office again, so Former Coworker A could meet up with us for Costco food court lunch, which people had been trying to do for weeks in memory of the old days. Costco is only a block form the office, so I guess in the old days before we had fancy bribes to get people in the office like delivered lunch, everybody would go to Costco for pizza and hotdogs.

Now I am on vacation.

Read: Kelcie Murphy and the Academy for the Unbreakable Arts (Erika Lewis): 12-year-old with special parentage and secret magical powers finds out she’s going to magical fighting school, weird teachers, puppy love, war in the magical world, Celtic mythology edition. Some disability representation, more authentic modern-orphan backstory. Doesn’t seem entirely well-edited.

Written: 419 today, 1244 for the week, 6660 overall.

Went to the office, it was annoying, ate a sandwich, it was okay.

Written: 347 today, 825 for the week, 6241 overall.

Went into the office, found out the office is moving to about a five-minute walk from the place I lived before I moved to San Jose, ate some fairly satisfying Reubens.

Written: 459 today, 1012/1000 for the week, 4393 overall.