Tag: tv

Check! Also International Creativity Day, which, maybe not.

I did not get much work done because Sage wanted to sleep on my all day, but then exactly at quitting time another department completely screwed up a shared resource and I had to spend an hour and some helping get things recombobulated.

Watched (live-action TV): Murderbot 1.4: I’m glad we got the line about Dr. Mensah being an intrepid galactic explorer, but we didn’t need the idiot or the spurious countdown.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage 5.2: The one with the hockey. I think they formed an autonomous workers’ collective at the end, which is always good.

Read (manga): The Whole of Humanity Has Gone Yuri Except For Me (Hiroki Haruse): One morning, a high-school girl wakes up in a world that has had only women for a hundred years. This is not just a setup; figuring out what happened and what the main characters feel about it is the plot. The art could be better, but there are girl-smooches. Complete in one double-sized omnibus.

Read (novella): All Systems Red (Martha Wells): The TV show is all well and good, but I felt a need to reread the books, and yep, they’re better. Because Murderbot is the best, and the non-goofy Preservation researchers are also the best.

Read (novella): Artificial Condition (Martha Wells): ART is also the best.

Read (novella): Rogue Protocol (Martha Wells): I guess Miki could have been the best, but… CombatBots are definitely the worst.

Written (catgirl): 301.

A pink flamingo is a well-fed flamingo full of brine shrimp!

Also End of the Middle Ages Day, which is apropos since I was thinking about how D&D is not medieval. (It’s mostly Renaissance, with some Wild West and Post-Apocalyptic thrown in.)

Went to the office, ate German food with vat-grown sausage, did some work.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage 5.1: New lair, and Nate is up to something that’s probably self-destructive. The one with the airplane.

Read (novel): Advocate (Daniel M Ford): Frontier town necromancer-sheriff has to go back to civilization to help defend her mentor against trumped-up charges, which lets her use her noble background but also involves a lot of annoying politics.

Written (catgirl): 299.

And yet I did not play Perils & Princesses!

I did go to the farmer’s market, check on Ayse & fam’s cats, and eat fresh veggies and cheese with Marith.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage 1.1: Rewatched to see who the recurring character at the end of season 4 was. Oh, that guy. Yeah, fuck him. Also, Parker was a lot sexier in the premier. Not intrinsically, but she had more sexy scenes.

Written (catgirl): 191.

Turtles are good.

I am on vacation, because I didn’t retract my request for days off even though I am not worthy to go to Roseville.

Slept in until forever because I stayed up too late reading last night, then took some books to the used book store. They didn’t keep as much this time, but on the other hand I was finally able to move a bunch of stuff from the couch onto shelves. Not sure those couch shelves will ever recover, though.

Watched (live-action TV): Murderbot 3: Not a lot happened in this episode, or at least it didn’t have an arc. Not sure what Gurathin’s deal is, but I don’t think he’s just being pointlessly creepy.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage 4.17-18: Season finale! The one with Nate’s dad and the patent office and the return of the guy from before (who sucks). I thought this was the end of the original series and was bummed that there was no OT3, but actually there’s a whole season yet.

Read (manga): Sachi’s Monstrous Appetite vol 1-2 (Chomoran): Middle-school boy discovers that the high-school girl next store he has a crush on is actually a giant whale(?) monster and he smells delicious to monsters. Together, they fight crime keep the local monster population under control and have feelings.

Written (catgirl): 271.

Hi Ken!

Went to the office, some coworkers were there, ate samosas and saved my chicken biriyani for later, tried to straighten things up for vacation.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage 4.15-16: the one where they help a rich guy, and the one where Hardison tries to be the mastermind. Only two episodes left in the season, so the guy who shows up at the end is probably going to be important for the finale.

Read (RPG): Under Hollow Hills (Meguey Baker, Vincent Baker): You are a fairy circus that travels around performing and getting involved in fairy shenanigans. Pretty much the opposite of Apocalypse World tonally, yet still very PbtA. Shifting toward Summer or Winter, planning shows, ensuring there’s always someone who doesn’t want you there, attending your own funeral, all the important fairy tropes are covered, in a way that’s generic enough to let players come up with their own ideas of fairy but evocative enough to always be Fairy.

Read (novel): The Devils (Joe Abercrombie): In an alternate Europe full of anthropophagous elves, murder, religious schisms, murder, various forms of holy and unholy sorcery, murder, etc, an extremely hapless monk is given command of a band of monstrous criminals and sent to deliver the lost princess of Troy to her throne. It’s Abercrombie, so it’s the darkest and murderiest of comedy, but surprisingly for alternate-historical grimness, I don’t think there’s any sexual violence. Stayed up way too late finishing it.

Written (catgirl): 171.

Why yes, every aspect of the world is completely fucked up.

Watched (live-action TV): Murderbot 1-2: Surprisingly, I didn’t hate it! Sure, the main casting was Wrong, but at least it was a real actor who could be misanthropic, and everybody else was fine. The changes were appropriate for the medium, the Murderbot voiceover wasn’t terrible, the Preservation crew were weird space hippies with ethics and feelings instead of profit motive, etc. Worth signing up for a free trial of AppleTV for.

Written (catgirl): 250 exactly.

One of two, and that’s not counting Velociraptor Awareness Day.

Went to the office, spaced out during a long all-hands meeting, ate some rice and vegetables and meat, put up with Coworker R being a libertarian and also engaging in the British national sport of complaining (I have no moral high ground here), closed some cases.

I complained on slack about being ditched for the journey to and from Roseville, so now everybody there can hate me too. They’re right that I could at least look for a taxi if I hate both gig economy and people doing things for me, though.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage 4.14: While the girls were out righting a wrong at a fancy party, the boys were getting into some kind of mobster trouble with an idiot.

Read (novel): Emberstone Farm vol 2 (L Meili): More OP-ness, world events that are alarming to people who think they live in reality, system usage that’s alarming to people who think they live in reality, extremely off-screen sex, nothing like an actual problem for the MC.

Read (manga): Assorted Entanglements vol 2 (Mikanuji): Apparently it’s been two years since I read volume 1, so I don’t remember if any of these are the same characters, but they’re all super gay and somewhat ridiculous anyway.

Written (catgirl): 202.

Because fuck Nazis, that’s why.

Went to the office, only Coworker T was there, ate a Thai(?) ground pork and rice thing, did some work.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage 4.13: Everyone attempts to have a night off, but Parker, Sophie, and Tara find a leverage job. As always, nobody can get anything done without Hardison, but the other boys are pretty useless.

Read (graphic novel): Fangirl vol 3 (Rainbow Rowell, Gabi Nam): Boy trouble, writing trouble, sister trouble, parent trouble.

Written (catgirl): 169.

All hail Emperor Maximilian XXIX of the Northern Shores!

But no parades for my digestive tract, which apparently was working up to being really gross and causing me to sit on the toilet in the middle of the night so I could faint onto the floor and break the litter box and scrape up my face and bang my tooth, and also sleep poorly. I stayed in bed until later in the morning, but eventually it seemed like I was enough of a hollow husk of a body to get up and log in to work. I accomplished several tasks, even.

Marith claimed the mysterious shoes, so that’s good.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage 4.12: That was a very silly episode. Maybe Nate should put more work into not being a jerk and less into speaking Football.

Read (anthology): Duties (Moe Lane): Another four-story collection, with a robot who won’t shut up about how gross meatbags are, a dryad, the secret base where the US government sends everything that you might naively assumed would go to the warehouse from Raiders of the Lost Ark, and a frog.

Read (manga): Avant-Garde Yumeko (Shuzo Oshimi): Yumeko doesn’t want to sleep with anybody, she just wants to know what dicks look like. Then it gets weird. Contains actual pictures of dicks, which I was really not expecting. So many dicks.

Written (catgirl): 119, still notes. I should probably stop futzing around and write something for real.

It is very important to be aware of velociraptors!

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage 4.11: Parker seems a little too into that role, although Hardison’s not complaining. Also, I’m not sure that’s a fight Nate should have picked for them, but on the other hand, fuck all those guys.

Read (manga): Nightfall Travellers vol 2 (Tomohi): More exploration of hills and shrines and other spooky places. Maybe it’s actually the other girl who will turn out to be a ghost?

Written (catgirl): 109 of notes.

I have some of those! Victory!

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage 4.9-10: The one where they have to save the day with only an airport as resources and the one where Sterling talks them into stealing a technobabble from a chess tournament.

Read (manga): Leviathan vol 1 (Shiro Kuroi): Scavengers investigate a derelict spaceship while reading the journal of one of the schoolkids who descended right into savagery when the ship was damaged.

Written (catgirl): 234 of worldbuilding notes.

Went to the office, ate a Mediterranean-salmon burrito thing, did some work.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage 4.8: Conning the Mako.

Read (manga): Go With the Clouds North-by-Northwest vol 1 (Aki Irie): A Japanese teenager in Iceland, using his secret psychometry powers to do detective work while his grandpa picks up on the ladies. Lots of Icelandic scenery, people who make the MC’s life difficult, family trouble. By the same mangaka as Ran and the Gray World.

Read (novel): The City That Would Eat the World (John Bierce): In a world where everything runs on the very specific blessings of myriad gods, a god appeared who slowed aging for members of the city watch as long as they were on the walls. A few centuries later, everyone is officially part of the guard and the entire city is walls (except the interstices where the underclass labor and age, but that’s not important) and doing its best to cover the whole world. A disillusioned citizen and an outsider whose home was destroyed by the city’s extractive industries and general capitalist shittiness get stuck taking a god to the West Pole through this bizarre world full of corrupt societies, and doing their best to not suck along the way. There’s a lot of exposition because it’s a very different world, and the main characters are unfortunately straight, but people resisting capitalism is always good.

Written (catgirl): 122.

D’oh, I completely forgot!

Randomly took the day off work, since I was owed a day from working on President Day. Meant to get up and listen in on Friday morning training anyway, but completely failed and ended up sleeping in until I felt bad about not feeding the cats. Then I was moving so I fed myself with Pakistani-Indian Fusion Cuisine, spicy chicken qorma and less-spicy samosas and butter garlic sesame-seed naan. It might have been sufficiently celebratory.

I could possibly have done something useful, but mostly I cleaned up browser tabs, quite a few of which were short stories I had been meaning to read. Watched some TV with Marith, who is sick as well as having no computer. Probably I didn’t catch her cold. I hope my computer didn’t catch anything either.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage 4.7: The one with shady funeral home family, where Parker has an honest-to-something feeling.

Read (manga): In/Spectre vol 19 (Kyo Shirodaira, Chashiba Katase): A bunch of one-chapter stories. Kuro tried to star in one, Rikka played a horrible prank, assorted yōkai caused trouble.

Read (short): “Victory Citrus is Sweet” (Thoraiya Dyer): A spacer who is actually kind of a jerk gets himself and his apprentice in trouble by cutting corners to show somebody up.

Read (short): “Welcome to the Medical Clinic at the Interplanetary Relay Station | Hours Since the Last Patient Death: 0” (Caroline M Yoachim): A future in which the current American medical system is still in place. Story in the form of a choose-your-own-adventure.

Read (short): “When the Yogurt Took Over: A Short Story” (John Scalzi): Definitely a different spin on the “enough computers together form a mind” trope.

Read (short): “Transcript of Interaction Between Astronaut Mike Scudderman and the OnStar Hands-Free A.I. Crash Advisor” (Grady Hendrix): Did you want your AI to be useful? Sorry, your timeline stems from the Trump-Musk presidency, you only get a chatbot.

Read (short): “Wikihistory” (Desmond Warzel): Everybody who gets access to time travel does it, then some long-suffering admin has to revert their changes.

Read (short): “In the Forests of Memory” (E Lily Yu): A sad story about an old lady in a cemetery of holographic grave markers, living off the offerings.

Read (short): “Presence” (Ken Liu): A sad story about an emigrant visiting his dying mother in the old country via telepresence.

Read (short): “The Thief of Memory” (Sunyi Dean): What is identity but memory? Also not a happy story, although you can’t blame a desparate teenager for making a rookie mistake.

Read (short): “The Dark House” (AC Wise): A haunted house, a haunted photographer, haunted photographs.

Written (game design): 136.

Does maniacal cackling count?

Went to the office, had the room to myself, ate a Mediterranean chicken burrito, did a little work. Probably didn’t hydrate enough.

Watched (live-action): Leverage 4.6: Elliot saves a small girl from a carnival.

Read (novel): Stars, Hide Your Fires (Jessica Best): A small-time crook from a crapsack world infiltrates an upper-crust ball to pick pockets, but although she meets a cute girl, the upper crust has problems of its own. Very Star Wars setting: blasters and spaceships, but social structures including security procedures are stuck in Three Musketeers era at best.

Read (manga): In/Spectre vol 17 (Kyo Shirodaira, Chashiba Katase): A different yuki-onna mystery, with extra historical sword school shenanigans.

Written (game design): 104.

Or Pie Day, depending who you ask.

Had another multi-hour customer call, but my suggestion in hour 1 turned out to be the solution as soon as I stepped into the other room during hour 5.

Watched (animated TV): The Dragon Prince 3.8-9: The final battle! Not very well-commanded on either side, but that’s it for the season, and a hook for next season.

Read (novel): Installment Immortality (Seanan McGuire): Another one from the perspective of the babysitter ghost, still fighting the Covenant with all her new restrictions now that she serves a proper god and not the Crossroads. Finally she gets to interact with normal ghosts, which come in a great variety, because this series is all about taxonomy.

Read (manga): Pandora Seven vol 1 (Yuta Kayashima): The only human on a remote island is thrust into adventure when other humans show up to get the power hidden there and it activates and attaches to the heroine. Flying ships, mechanical forests, unethical biotech witches, and human dominance over the other sapient species by means of prophecy should be cool, but it’s not quite there.

Written (catgirl): 184

 

I ward off the Tooth Fairy with floss and fluoride!

Watched (animation): The Dragon Prince 3.5-7: Humans are the worst, and yet Viren is taking that as a challenge.

Read (novel): Momo Arashima Steals the Sword of the Wind (Misa Sugiura): A bullied Japanese-American middle-schooler discovers that she is actually special and goes on an adventure through Japanese mythology. It’s legitimately hard being Momo, some minor anger issues are perfectly understandable.

Read (manga): I read enough that I’m keeping up with my inches-per-week, but it’s part of a huge thick omnibus so I haven’t finished and logged the title yet.

Written (catgirl): 153.

Another one more honor’d in the breach etc.

Did some shopping, but the store failed me. Did some more shopping for cats, which worked better, then tried another shopping with a stupid walk for my stupid mental and physical health, which got me what I was looking for but the bus failed me so I had to carry bags of heavy stuff until my shoulders were sore.

Watched (live action): The Bureau of Magical Things 1-2: An otherwise normal Australian teenager accidentally gets magical powers and has to interact with the magical creatures she can now see, some of whom are extremely obnoxious. A return to the days of less polished special effects, with a female-dominated cast.

Read (manga): My Girlfriend’s Not Here Today vol 1 (Kiyoko Iwami): Girl A is frustrated because her secret (because homophobia) girlfriend B isn’t paying her enough attention and now Girl C has found A’s secret social media account and is stalking her and it’s a huge mess but C is hot and paying attention to A, so I don’t think this love triangle is going to be resolved in a way that is both healthy and satisfactory to all concerned.

Written (catgirl): 198.

As long as it doesn’t need any public funding, I guess.

Had to work half a day, but nothing actually happened until it was already time to hand off to the next region.

Watched (live action): Lockwood & Co 8: Another Lockwood plan that should have gotten them all killed, some light betrayal, but everything somehow turns out okay in the end. So much setup for a next season, which I presume will never happen because Netflix.

Read (comic): Rainbow vol 1 (Sunny & Gloomy): A reread from Webtoons, this first volume about a girl with a vivid imagination(?) and a terrible mother goes about as far as I read before. It is very cute, although also kind of dark.

Written (catgirl): Reread from the beginning of the current iteration and made 113 of quick typo fixes and notes on inconsistencies

I thought it was March that stereotypically had wind, but I haven’t flown a kite in decades.

No anime, Marith is feeling poorly.

Watched (live action TV): Lockwood & Co 6: The fancy party episode, now with more mysterious conspirators!

Read (novel): Industrial Strength Magic (Macronomicon): The teenage son of a gadgeteer supervillain and wizard superheroine combines the gifts he got from his parents to get exponentially-increasing magic-gadgeteering power in a post-apocalyptic  (or maybe just apocalyptic) world of supervillains and kaiju and sanity-destroying astronomy. There is a potential love triangle, but I think it may be resolved properly (ie, poly).

Read (manga): Dandadan vol 11 (Yukinobu Tatsu): Fallout from everybody getting mugged by aliens in the last volume. Time for training montages!

Written (game design): 115.

Also Working Naked Day, which I did not celebrate. I did eat pizza, however.

Watched (live action): Lockwood & Co 5: Ugh, Lucy, did they not teach you situational awareness at ghost-hunter vocational school?

Read (novel): When Gracie Met the Grump (Mariana Zapata): A young woman who is keeping a very low profile has one of the world’s only three superheroes fall out of the sky into her yard. Adventure ensues, but it’s just an excuse for (normal girl-alpha alpha male) romance. There is a terrifying grandmother.

Read (manga): A Sinner of the Deep Sea vol 2 (Akihito Tomi): Punk mermaid meets love-struck mermaid’s boy, and then mermaid politics gets in the way of the jailbreak. I’m rooting for the punk mermaid and the boy’s badass sister, but it’s probably too heteronormative.

Read (manga): When the Villainess Seduces the Main Heroine vol 1 (Kasai Fujii): Standard opening of the crown prince accusing his fiancee of assorted villainy and dumping her for a different girl, but this time the ex asks the new girl if she really wants to stay with somebody so fickle and so disappointing in bed. She doesn’t, so the two women shack up together and enjoy life (and each other) despite the attempted interference of titled assholes. Not smut with graphic sex scenes, but lots of sex nevertheless.

Written (game design): 127.

Didn’t drink any hot chocolate, because I’m not smart enough, and considering how easy hot chocolate is…

Watched (live action): Lockwood & Co 4: Surely there is no way this can go wr- oh.

Read (manga): Yakuza Reincarnation vol 5-7 (Hiroki Miyashita, Takeshi Natsuhara): Picked this back up after a long hiatus. Our old-fashioned honorable yakuza reincarnated as a fantasy princess finishes dealing with the numerous problems in the city of the dwarves, which of course are a further escalation of the demonic activity in the previous episodes, and moves on to the walking city to get her minion doctored up, which exposes normal corruption but also more information about skill trees.

Written( game design): 253 of rearranging skill lists on the Titanic.

Definitely not legal to commemorate any more.

Wasted my time doing low-level crafting in Shop Titans to get the event tasks that only care about how many of something, not tiers.

Watched (live action): Lockwood & Co 3: I thought that plot was going to last longer, but nope!

Read (manga): Dinosaur Sanctuary vol 1 (Itaru Kinoshita, Shin-Ichi Fujiwara): Zookeeping x dinosaurs, with a real paleontologist to make sure the dinosaurs are right. There’s some plot involving the humans and their finances and devotion to dinosaurs, or something, but that’s not really important.

Written (game design): 103.

I like peanut brittle, but See’s is always out of stock of the sugar-free. I hope they haven’t discontinued it

Managed to buy a cat supply, but mostly I was useless and had pizza.

Watched (live action): Lockwood & Co 2: What are the odds that the PCs think there’s a conspiracy and there actually isn’t? Although it’s not like the authorities don’t have perfectly legitimate grounds for quashing them.

Read (manga): Monster Cats vol 1 (Pandania): 4-panel comics about cats crossed with various monsters like gargoyle, slime, sphinx, bedsheet ghost, etc. They are still all adorable cats.

Written (game design): 103.

But it’s Monday the 13th, so apparently stickers are cursed now.

I guess I did a work today. Kind of.

Watched: Jentry Chau vs the Underworld 10-13: Of course she had to go into Diyu to resolve things, but resolved they did get, although not to everybody’s satisfaction. Lots of work for building contractors, though. The End!

Read (manga): We Can’t Do Just Plain Love vol 1 (Mafuyu Fukita): He has a complex about women, but also he smells delicious and she has a scent fetish, so she suggests helping with exposure therapy, by which she means banging. Am I too old for smut?

Read (novel): Something Fabulous (Alexis Hall): A dutiful duke, a runaway fiancee, an extremely fabulous twin brother, and a whole lot of other queer characters on a chase across Regency England and through the duke’s feelings. (Everybody else is pretty clear on what they do or don’t want.) No one is shot who doesn’t kind of deserve it, and there is a HEA. Also butt stuff.

Written: 147.

Even if I still counted, seems like a terrible idea.

Did some shopping, got one hair cut, went on a stupid walk for my stupid mental and physical health, was otherwise completely useless. Did go to bed (slightly) before midnight for the first time this year, though.

Watched: Jentry Chau vs the Underworld 7-9: Wow, that character just keeps getting more and more untrustworthy. But the truth is coming out, along with more Underworld lore and more boy trouble.

Read (manga): Peach Boy Riverside vol 11-12 (coolkyousinnjya, Johanne): Those guys are everywhere! Also, what is up that one guy? Oh, not what I thought, but still good. Or bad.

Written: 287. Does any of this make any sense? Probably not.

That now seems like National Turn On The Lights Day. Which may be a thing, I guess.

Was on call all afternoon, but the customers were also on vacation. (Obviously there are customers for whom this is not a holiday time, but they mostly in other time zones.)

Watched: Jentry Chau vs the Underworld 1-3: A animated Chinese-American girl has to return to small-town Texas, the site of her traumatic past with mysterious fire powers. Chinese mythology and Daoist magic ensue.

Read: The Executioner and Her Way of Life vol 2-3 (Mato Sato, Ryo Mitsuya, nilitsu): Oh, that’s why everybody is scared of the isekai girls. Too bad the power structure created to deal with them doesn’t work any better than other power structures.

Written: 219.

Not that we need x-rays any more, American health insurance is megadoses of ivermectin for everything!

Did not go to the office, did a little work, snuggled some cats.

Watched: The Dragon Prince 3.2-4: Intrigue, betrayal, smooching, body horror, doom.

Read: Girl Squad Volta (Maya Lin Wang): A teenaged girl of mysterious background is sure that her taller, more athletic, more driven friend is the one being hunted by interdimensional magical girls. Action ensues, and at the end, one of them is going to interdimensional magical girl school.

Written: 215.

Because Columbus is deservedly in the Bad Place.

Read: Komi Can’t Communicate vol 31 (Tomohito Oda): Some romance with a date that went poorly, not as much goofy stuff, Komi wants to study Making Friends at college.

Watched: The Dragon Prince 2.9-3.1: Rewatch, because we didn’t remember what was going on. Not sure if we’ll keep going from here to skip ahead until we get to new stuff.

Written: 303.

Around here, every day is gibberish day in one form or another!

Watched: Murder Drones 6-8: The end! I still have very little idea what was going on, but we did get to see Uzi’s mom (kind of).

Read: Beyond the Reach of Earth (Ken MacLeod): Oh, that’s what the deal with the alien artifacts is. The third book should be exciting.

Written: 167

Another day that should be every day.

Watched: Dead Boy Detectives 1.8: FInal showdown with the biggest villain! Or at least the most antagonistic, the Night Nurse might technically be bigger, and her supervisor definitely is, but they’re also more reasonable. The end! Everything is good for another season, but I guess Neil Gaiman is cancelled for being a sex creep, so apparently there won’t be one. (This is why men should never be allowed to be involved in anything ever.)

Read: ShipCore (Erios909): I don’t think it’s technically litRPG, even though it has large blocks of robotic text in square brackets. Also no magic, unless you count forcefields and FTL travel and dubious nanotech. However, there are also no male main characters.

Read: Magilumiere Magical Girls Inc vol 3 (Sekka Iwata, Yu Aoki): Magical girl magitech convention, which you would think would be the best place for a monster attack, but it does take some work to save the day. Also possibly there’s a plot.

Written: 140. I came up with a name, which might not be the most nominatively-deterministic, but that’s okay. People just have names sometimes, even in the superhero genre.