Tag: office

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.

In the office again, for Chick-Fil-A and meetings about support for the ~Special~ customers, which the now-sacked Boss R was supposed to have gotten sorted and which is not sorted. Also my custom of commuting home in the middle of the afternoon is now officially approved.

Read: Ruby Finley vs The Interstellar Invasion (K Tempest Bradford): An 11-year-old black girl who likes bugs finds a mysterious bug and trouble ensues. Even though it’s set in the present (smartphones, Twitter, etc) the main character gets to ride her bike around the neighborhood and visit her friends without having an adult and a car and a schedule.

Read: “The Star-Bear” (Michael Swanwick): I think I’m not Russian enough, or not Russian-lit-reading enough, to get this one. Pretty sure the bear is a metaphor, though.

Written: 102 today, 1215 for the week, 2862 overall.

Back to the office for no good reason. American restaurant pasta for lunch. Light customer activity, which would seem lighter if we weren’t missing so many people.

Read: Spell Sweeper (Lee Edward Fodi): It’s the anti-Harry Potter, where the main character has tiny magical powers so instead of learning real magic at Secret Magic School, she’s on the janitorial track, and her hated rival is the Chosen One, a magical prodigy, tall and beautiful, beloved by everyone, etc. Naturally they have to work together to save the world, despite the unhelpfulness of the adult wizards.

Written: 229, 1113, 2760.

We had two separate going-away celebrations for Coworker A (who was Boss A when I joined), who is leaving us to go back to her ancestral homeland. She’s been a pillar of the team the whole time I’ve been with Aerospike, so it is sad to see her go, but hopefully she will do well in this new phase of her life!

Written: 229 for the day, 1103 for the week and overall.

Taco Wednesday in the office.

New (minor) Minecraft version, but I only logged in enough to make sure my main world still works.

Read: Some Desperate Glory (Emily Tesh): Yes, the MC is supposed to be that awful at the beginning, because she is starting her story of personal growth (and saving a lot of people) from the very bottom. Much of the plot could have been avoided if the aliens had a better concept of security, but that wasn’t really the point.

Written: 305 for the day, 878 for the week and overall.

Went to the office, found out New Boss R has been canned after six months, not much work got done after that. Details are scarce, but apparently he just wasn’t measuring up. I hope these times are not going to be too interesting.

Read: The Witch King (Martha Wells): Much more like the Raksura books than Murderbot, of course, but still pretty good. MC is a body-switching demon, magic is complicated, imperialism sucks, human customs vary. (At least, I think they’re human; no mention of intermarriage, though, so maybe it’s a zillion different species like the Raksura books.)

Written: 187.

Went to the office, ate Panda Express (probably not made from real pandas), spent too much time screwing around with the stupid Windows laptop I have to lug around for Federal support, came back home, blugh.

Read: Critical Mass (Craig Alanson): Kind of deus ex machina, but triumphant. Yet apparently, not the end!

Written: 238, somehow.

Yuck, commuting. Managed to do a work or two, though.

Read: Armageddon (Craig Alanson): Oops, they ran out of charmed life. Also, it seems like sooner or later Skippy is going to get his wormhole transit card proactively revoked.

Read: Chamomile #1-323 (JezMM): I couldn’t remember where I was, so I had to start from the beginning. Oh no, such a burden, reading about silly cute people.

Written: 207 words, somehow.