No Summit activities today (everyone is flying or touristing or whatever), which is good because I have no braincells left.
Watched (live-action TV): The Librarians 2.3: Hey, look, it’s Stone’s backstory! Also, an extremely annoying monster of the week.
Written (Geometry for Mutants): 390.
Also Perfect Sour Candy Day.
As always, I slept in too much and went shopping, but did not go to anime because Dave is sick.
Watched (live-action TV): The Librarians 2.2: The new villain invades the Library in search of a magical upgrade, but Flynn is still master of the Library. Also Baird made some kind of deal with the minion, because there is exploitable tension there, but we’re not sure exactly what it was.
Read (short): The Price of Meat (KJ Charles): In the middle of alt-C19 London, there is a region where the law does not apply, and the worst of the worst take refuge to plot their criminal plots. Our Heroine has to infiltrate it to repay the coppers for saving her girlfriend from an oubliette for the insane, and it is about as bad as you expect from the title.
Read (graphic novel): The New Girl vol 2 (Cassandra Calin): Now that she has a friend group and is getting better at French, our main character can experience more advanced forms of middle-school suffering, like mean girls and romantic ambiguity and medical misogyny. But she does make it to the end of the school year mostly intact and still cute!
Read (manga): Mii-chan Wants to be Kept vol 1 (Waka Takase): Hapless male MC rescues a cat, who turns out to be a specific kind of werecat and won’t go away even though her being gorgeous and immodest is very upsetting. Unnecessarily heterosexual on multiple levels.
Read (manga): Common-Sense Monster vol 1 (Warugi Wanai, Shinobu Shinotsuki): A social maladjusted highschool girl discovers that her popular classmate is actually an anthropophagous horror in a girl suit and asks her to teach her how to fake being a functional member of society. This doesn’t go quite as badly as it could, since the human girl is cunning and the monster is pretty risk-averse.
Read (game): Picaro! (Wythe Marschall): Allegedly from an unsigned manuscript found tucked into a used RPG book from the 70s, rewritten to the finder’s preferred system because game design in the 70s was… not advanced. I have read too many books from the 70s and earlier that started “dunno how this manuscript made it from Mars to my PO box, but here you go” to believe that, but I guess it’s not actually impossible. Anyway, you play cunning rogues sticking it to the Man on behalf of the people. There is one stat that is both how much the people like you, rolled by the players to get help/equipment for their heists, and how much the authorities hate you, rolled by the GM to add more opposition to their heists. Also, many feats/supernatural powers/spells, that all use a single pool of points that decreases throughout the adventure. I am not sure what I think of games that use that mechanic.
Written (Geometry for Mutants): 142. Is this scene really accomplishing any goals, though?
That sounds bad, but really snek is frond.
I accomplished more work than yesterday, possibly because the meeting was cancelled. However, Sunday’s gaming is also cancelled.
Watched (live-action TV): The Librarians 2.1: Introducing the new season villain and his henchman right up front!
Read (graphic novel): The New Girl vol 1 (Cassandra Calin): A Romanian girl moves to Quebec, where she has to attend learning-to-français middle-school and has no friends and her horrible periods have just started and her little brother is learning French faster and also is a git and everything is terrible, at least to start.
Read (from the shelf): FAIL. I read half of a very thick thing, but did not complete anything.
Written (Geometry for Mutants): 235. Something that had been going to happen later fit now, so I put it in. That means I have to come up with something even worse for later, right?
Not like in The Prestige, though!
Watched (live-action TV): The Librarians 1.10: Hey, look, everything they’ve collected over the season is important in the finale! Also, the usual ethical questions with respect to timelines that now never happened.
Read (light novel): A Livid Lady’s Guide to Getting Even vol 1 (Hagure Metabo): The traditional young-lady-dumped-by-the-crown-prince-in-favor-of-some-floozie opening. Since this young lady has actually been doing all the work of running the kingdom, she’s happy to have a vacation in jail while waiting for the king and other alleged adults to appreciate how wrong things are going without her, but then she learns they’re off faffing about because of course she’ll take care of it. Then she runs off to the enemy kingdom to set up her own cosmetics empire and not have anything to do with any of those idiots ever again. Unfortunately, she is too perfect for it to be interesting. Also, when war finally comes, we didn’t need that scene.
Read (novel): Tavern Rats (Matt Youngmark): An apprentice wizard who suddenly learns she has to pay off her student debt or leave school formulates a terrible plan to loot a dungeon, assembles the worst adventuring party ever, gets completely lost within a day’s walk of her hometown, and then things really go off the rails. It is extremely D&D (orcs, cantrips, dark elves, tree kraken, druids, etc) but manages to be funny anyway.
Read (comic collection): Doom’s Division (Yoon Ha Lee, Minkyu Jung, Mattia Iacono): I figured anything written by Yoon Ha Lee would be great, but I know nothing about the continuity and am not invested in the characters, so meh.
Written (Geometry for Mutants): 154. My MC needs a really good plan now, and I don’t have one for her.
Depending on how many eggs you have, that might be a very large sugar cookie.
Watched (live-action TV): The Librarians 1.9: I guess this is another universe where mad science is indistinguishable from magic, but we saw that with the STEM fair episode. Surprisingly, the math doesn’t completely fail to work out for the Infernal Device, although the engineering does.
Read (novel): Bones in the Dark (TF Warden): A just-graduated mage of an unsettling magic system gets assigned to be a cop in a provincial city and finds out that real life is more complicated than theory. Also, she kicks a lot of ass, gains even vaster eldritch power, makes friends and enemies, etc.
Read (novel): Stealing Light (Gary Gibson): Same sub-genre as the “Architects of Earth” series: cyberpunk or post-cyberpunk space humans, aliens of various levels up to Completely Overwhelming, weird human factions, alien conspiracies, the scourge that will destroy all, etc. In this case, the scourge hasn’t quite manifested yet, but humans are enthusiastically poking it with sticks in the hope of gaining a tiny bit of power over other humans. Don’t trust the fish-guys.
Read (from the shelf): FAIL.
Written (Geometry for Mutants): 164.
Your dog deserves a Thai-Ethiopian fusion wrap!
Did some work, but sadly would have done more work if I were in the office, I suspect.
Watched (live-action TV): The Librarians 1.8: It wouldn’t be a haunted house if they didn’t make all the mistakes. Serves them right for sidelining Cassandra, though.
Read (graphic novel): When I Arrived at the Castle (EM Carroll): Catgirl vs vampire, in a hallucinatory castle full of blood and doom and corpses and nudity.
Read (novel): The Ethersmith vol 2 (Matias Kallio):MC finally makes it to a city where she can wow them with her ethersmithing skills, but surprise! Her grandfather isn’t dead, so there’s a quest and also impending doom.
Written (Geometry for Mutants): 224.
I was technically working today, but feel like I accomplished about as much as a fairly drab catfish.
Watched (live-action TV): The Librarians 1.7: An obvious antagonist, given the Arthurian connections, but not where one would expect her to be.
Read (novel): I’m Not the Chosen One (Richard Roberts): She’s the Chosen One’s little sister, so of course she takes the magic ship and catgirl follower for a joyride. The quest to restore the broken world ensues.
Read (comic collection): Eat the Rich (Sarah Gailey, Pius Bak, Roman Titov): Not subtle, but that’s fine, because fuck those guys.
Written (Geometry for Mutants): 176.
Also Film Your Pets Sauntering Day.
Watched (live-action TV): The Librarians 1.6: Not a new concept at all, but reasonably well-done. I’m glad Cassandra got to keep the [SPOILER] and [SPOILER] and hopefully she still has the [SPOILER] as well.
Read (from the shelf): FAIL.
Written (Geometry for Mutants): 236.
Logged in to work early to attend the meeting about using AI in our company. I managed to hold on by muting and yelling at the screen for a while, but then someone started going on about “when Claude is an AGI” and I had to drop. Holy shit, why are people so dumb? (People, of course, are going “holy shit, why is Trip so dumb?”)
Watched (live-action TV): The Librarians 1.5: For a brief moment, it looked like Ezekial and Jenkins were going to get along, or that Flynn was going to return, or that Cassandra was going to go full supervillain, but no. Still pretty good, and further confirmation about Dulaque.
Read (from the shelf): FAIL.
Written (Geometry for Mutants): 283. Do I need the astronomy knowledge now? Maybe I can put it off longer.
Check! Also National Cheese Day, but cheese isn’t really good for cats.
Watched (live-action TV): The Librarians 1.4: That’s one way to handle the plethora of Yule spirits, I guess. Also to oppress Baird, but blondes deserve more oppression, right? Also, I don’t think I caught before that the master villain is Dulaque.
Read (novel): Catch and Kill (Craig Schaefer): Cyberpunk plus magic, apparently the future of the “Harmony Black” series or a possible future of an alternate timeline of it. A tightly-knit team of a mage who was never understood at university, a hacker who’s turning herself into a catgirl, an ex-soldier, and an ex-military killer robot (sexy lady subclass) get mixed up in horrible skullduggery with corporate psychopaths and rival wizards. Much better than book Shadowrun, made me think of Carl Shadowrun.
Read (from the shelf): FAIL.
Written (Geometry for Mutants): 159.
If the dinosaur is not large enough to carry you comfortably, riding a tandem bike with them is also acceptable.
Watched (live-action TV): The Librarians 1.3: That was actually better, without the chief librarian to solve everything and tell everyone what to do. I also liked the way the thing was written, very much like a Fallen London status that modifies all your cards until you get rid of it somehow.
Read (novel): Splinter Angel vol 1 (AvaritiaBona): Isekai litRPG, a bodyguard is pulled into fantasyland where she gets an OP bodyguarding class and starts leveling up while trying to find out what is going on with having been sucked into another universe. The gimmick of this one is that the MC is, if not a sociopath, personality disorder of some kind. She’s not mean, but she’s extremely unfussed about violence and also not great at peopling.
Read (from the shelf): FAIL.
Written (second rewrite of Geometry for Mutants): 302.
If you don’t, it’ll mean war.
Watched (live-action TV): The Librarians 1.2: And the first adventure is concluded, the world is saved, but pretty much any other pair kissing would be better than that.
Read (manga): Dandadan vol 18 (Yukinobu Tatsu): Speed Boy finally gets into the cursed board game, bearing important information… one round too late. Now everything is even more doomed.
Read (novel): A Journey in Other Worlds (John Jacob Astor): Written in the 1890s, about life in the year 2000. It is of course horrifyingly racist and sexist by our standards, but has all-electric everything, habitable planets throughout the solar system, a project to straighten out the Earth’s axis so the climate is always perfect, and Christian antigravity. The end goes into interplanetary afterlife theory, which seemed vastly unnecessary to me, but I guess men hadn’t yet discovered writing without exposition. An artifact of its time.
Written (rewrite of new project): 159. But although this new way of doing the thing is definitely better than the original, I think it’s not good enough yet.
Are bats themselves seasonal, or do they need a separate season reference?
Kind of did some work, I guess. Having energy and being awake is hard.
Watched (live-action TV): The Librarians 1.1: Marith’s right that it has Dr Who energy with the cheesy verve, but it’s really really not Leverage, and I can’t help comparing them since it’s the same director and some actors.
Read (manga): A Bride’s Story vol 11 (Kaoru Mori): All Smith and Talas and company this volume.
Read (novel): Sloppy Firsts (Megan McCafferty): High-school drama, but even though the protagonist is straight (ew, boys), she is charmingly misanthropic. Written as her actual diary entries and letters to her long-distance best friend, so there is some unreliability to the narration, or at least a lack of strict chronological ordering.
Written (new project): 264. Sage helped by deleting a paragraph so I had to write it again.