Tag: sickness

I’m short on bears, though. Also, shouldn’t this be shortly before Fat Bear Week? I’m sure party snacks are dense in calories!

My mucus is decreasing, but possibly asymptotically and not necessarily to zero, so still not in the office.

The new Murderbot is out, but it seems to follow on directly from the previous situation, so I had to reread.

Read: Network Effect (Martha Wells): This is the one the new book follows on from, I could tell even though I apparently didn’t remember it very well until I read it. I thought there was a lot more stuff with [SPOILER], but no.

Read: Fugitive Telemetry (Martha Wells): Published after Network Effect but set earlier, when Murderbot was hanging out on Preservation keeping an eye on Dr Mensah. I therefore did not have to reread it right now, but I did anyway, because Murderbot.

Written: FAIL. Only reading.

I mean, I kind of do, I’m just really bad at it!

Skipped going into the office to avoid sharing my mucus, although possibly I could have gotten away with it.

Read: She Who Became The Sun (Shelley Parker-Chan): It’s fantasy China, the Mongols have invaded, tragic backstories for everybody, but tragedy spawns ambition that will not be denied, which in turn spawns a whole lot of murders. There are a lot of terrible people, including the protagonists, but also a few good people and a lot of people who are just trying to get by. There isn’t any magic per se, but there are definitely supernatural elements to the world that can be taken advantage of by the few people aware of them. There are So. Many. Feelings. I was afraid this would be too hard to read with my 2023 brain, but although a lot of terrible things are done, it was not too much to deal with.

Written: 189 words, which is almost more than nothing.

Happy birthday, Nonny!

I had to get up early for bonus meetings, which are actually a feature of every normal Tuesday now but that doesn’t make me like them any more. I had no brain, I did some work, I read some more GLOG stuff, I coughed up a bunch of mucus, I read an essay about how Tolkien orcs and D&D orcs are in fact still racist no matter how much you say “it’s right there on the page they aren’t human” or “Professor Tolkien would never”. It also convinced me that D&D-style stats are bad, even if you manage to avoid racial modifiers (which hardly anyone does). All the “natural ability” or “innate potential” type stats are like thinking your IQ is what matters, instead of what skills and decisions you actually make with it. This does affect my game design thoughts, since I was already tending toward BitD-style actions or Castle Falkenstein-style skills for the Champions thing.

Played: Nothing. Not only is Ken busy with Nonny’s birthday, Vivian got her brain electrified today.

Written: FAIL. Too many snuggles, not enough free hands.

 

Yeaaaaah!

Of course Monday the 13th is also the most cursed of days, but that’s on theme. Probably explains why Coworker T brought COVID back from vacation, so he’s still out and Coworker K just left on vacation.

Still kind of coughy and generally disgruntled with biology.

Read some more GLOG stuff. BONES gives up on stats as chance of success entirely and uses them only for slot-based inventory capacity. A sword, a spell, a best friend, a bag of gold, a recurring nightmare, each one takes up a slot in the appropriate inventory. Wounds and stress and madness take up slots too, and kick out what you already have if there isn’t enough room.

Written: FAIL.

I had pneumonia when I was a smol, so will never say anything against antibiotics or modern medicine.

Gaming was cancelled because plague and infirmity abound, so once again I did nothing useful. I read more GLOG stuff and like all OSR stuff I have very mixed feelings (not even counting my growing dislike for hit points). It is (or can be) way cooler than the Hasbro (or wannabe Hasbro competitor) focus group product. Roll twice on this list of vaguely goetic, extremely specific extradimensional entities to see what you can summon. Oh, you want them to be useful? Sounds like a you problem! Anyway, the world is composed of four elements: ash, bones, blood, and fish. Artificial fire is the divine element and will not burn the righteous. Dogs are sacred because they’re warm! At the start of every day, tell us which saint’s day it is, who they’re the patron of, what they help with, and how they were martyred, and get one miracle die for each one you tell us! But on the other hand, I want my characters to be cute and successful and have to roll on the Death and Dismemberment table just because the d20 hates me. I know, that’s definitely a me problem.

Read: She Loves To Cook, and She Loves To Eat vol 3 (Sakaomi Yuzaki): And now Kasuga (the one who likes to eat) has put a name to her feelings for Nomoto!

Written: Continued, unending, FAIL.

I don’t feel at all qualified to comment on what’s happening in Israel, but pretty sure an armistice would not be bad. Alas, when all you have is a nation-state, everything looks like a rival nation-state.

I was well enough to eat chicken tenders and buy groceries today, but not to do any braining, so it’s good that customers didn’t want anything from me. Instead of braining, I read a bunch about GLOG, which is a (more) minimalist, (more) DIY submovement within OSR, or something. The first rule of GLOG is obviously that there are no rules to GLOG, but if there were a rule, it would be that classes only have four levels worth of stuff, so there are no boring levels, and if you don’t die (which you probably will, because OSR) you will end up multiclassing. Other commonalities among  Many Rats On Sticks (Skerples), Runaway Princesses (Alcoops), Nuclear Ooze (Micah A), Moonhop (Type1Ninja), Vain the Sword (Phlox), and Ultraviolet Gloglands (Skerples) are slot-based inventory, copious random tables, and a magic system where you spend some of your precious few magic dice on a spell, the parameters of the spell are based on how many dice you rolled and the sum of them all, doubles and triples are bad, and only dice that roll low come back for reuse. Roll under your stat instead of vs target number is common but not required. What happens when you get to zero hit points usually involves a Death and Dismemberment Table.

This is irrelevant to my own game design struggles, since I want no hit points and do want superpowers and mostly nonlethal combat and the ability to play vampires, robots, goo monsters, tulpas, living black holes, or whatever other craziness can happen in Champions, which is an entirely different paradigm, but I’ll pretend looking at any game design is helpful.

Written: FAIL.

My theory: Everything wrong with the US today is a result of insufficient Sesame Street.

Watched: My Happy Marriage 6-9: It was nice to see the random rich guys who thought they were so great pick a fight with an actual military monster hunter, but Cinderella still needs to communicate better!

Read: She Loves To Cook, and She Loves To Eat vol 2 (Sakaomi Yuzaki): It’s kind of adorable how Nomoto (the one who likes to cook) is just “Welp, guess I’m a lesbian, I should check the Internet to find out how that works” and now she has a pocket friend to discuss things with. Plus, new character with a completely different relationship to food than the main couple.

Written: 184, although it took me like two weeks to accumulate what should be half a night’s work. Neither kitties nor germs are conducive to writing. (Also I suck.)

My symptoms are pretty much gone, but I had no energy at all when it was time for work, so I took this as a sick day and did a lot of nothing. Well, I tried to clean up some of the mess from yesterday and stuff, and some of the household objects I ordered arrived, but mostly nothing.

In the afternoon I went grocery shopping, because I didn’t do that yesterday, and now I need things to eat. It was, as they say on the Internets, FUCKEN WIMDY. First the wind tried to kill me with a tree branch, then it threw my hat into traffic to get run over repeatedly. I did manage to buy food, but it was much too adventurous and exhausting for such a mundane errand.

The wind also took out Ken and Dave’s power, so no gaming.

Read: Katalepsis ch 14.1-18 (Hungry): Back to [SPOILER] and surprising information and annoying side characters and DOOOOM.

Written: Still FAIL.

Oh no, I am not better at all, as I found out in the middle of the night. The events are too horrifying to relate, but I think it’s norovirus. I hear that’s going around, and the symptoms match. Anyway, I spent all day half-asleep, neither eating nor drinking, and not being much use for my on-call shift. New Boss R couldn’t find anyone to cover, but fortunately the customers were all observing the holiday too.

Read: Katalepsis ch 13.1-14 (Hungry): Yep, I still really like this.

Written: Ahahahaha FAIL.