Tag: tv

So lethargic. Will I ever have the energy to get my blood tests done or my neck pinged? I barely managed to go grocery shopping and that’s something I do every week.

Got some maps going, and found out the zombie mine I found while tunneling downward in search of ore is actually way the heck out in the ocean. I guess that’s what happens when you generate dungeons randomly.

Watched: First episode of Shadow & Bone. Fortunately I haven’t read the books so I have no preconceptions, but I bet the criminals were also cooler in the books. They’re very Blades in the Dark.

Read: Beware of Chicken vol 2 (Casualfarmer): Everybody levels up doing farm and family things except the heroic xianxia rooster, who goes on a quest to learn magical secrets. Well, and the antagonists, but maybe being horrible is a family thing for them.

Written: FAIL.

 

Oh yeah, I did order Christmas presents for some people. Good job, past me!

Fortunately I was able to reuse the nature fact about tarantulas keeping pet frogs this week, but I definitely need to get some new facts. Maybe dinosaur facts, everybody likes dinosaurs.

Watched: Amphibia 9-10: Apparently there is some structure to this world besides one village surrounded by deadly hazards, and also, there’s clearly going to be doom.

Read: The Tryout (Christina Soontornvat, Joanna Cacao): Semi-autobiographical retelling of the author trying out for middle-school cheerleading squad as a nerdy Thai-American girl in a small Texas town.

Read: “The Difference Between Love and Time” (Catherynne M Valente): The space-time continuum reimagined as a kind of surreal, terrible boyfriend.

Read: Cotton Tales vol 1 (Loputyn): I’m not that familiar with the Gothic genre, but this seems like it: a young boy who has no idea what’s going on or who any of these people are, allegedly because he has amnesia; a huge house with a special tower to keep a mysterious relative in; sinister houseguests; unicorn rabbits that only some people can see, that seem to be at war with each other.

Written: 623 kitten words.

Put a container of precooked vegetables and several sliced-up sausages onto a baking sheet and put it in the over for a while. This counts as cooking N/N?

Read: “Undercover” (Tamsyn Muir): Maybe not necromancy per se, and not space, but lesbians and death and terror and betrayal!

Read: Freestyle (Gale Galligan): Graphic novel about 8th-grade breakdancers in NYC and drama around new friends and school and parents and yo-yos.

Watched: Amphibia 7-8: So basically female frog-people are terrifying. Seems legit.

Written: 670 kitten words.

Back to getting up early, but it was a useful meeting this time.

Watched: Amphibia 5-6: Not really any kind of plot, but who needs a plot when you have snailmobiles?

Read: How To Get A Girlfriend When You’re A Terrifying Monster (Marie Cardno): Apparently the answer is, hang out in your home dimension trying to not get absorbed until an intrepid explorer of fixed yet oddly hot shape shows up and follow her home. Screaming, hiding, and general panic may ensue, but there is a possibility of smooches.

Written: 390 kitten words.

 

Got up earlier than I would like for cleaners, but then managed to take a nap and get up a second time to go grocery shopping at a reasonable hour. Then I was a massive lump.

Watched: Amphibia 1-2: Jus recommended I watch it after finishing The Owl House, but I don’t like it as much. I guess I like a world of giant bones and bile magic better than one of human-sized frogs and giant insects. Maybe if there were more insects.

Written: 569 kitten words.

Wait, what happened to November?!

Two nights of fireplace noises has shown that this is not a good sleep aid. I think I need just plain white noise.

Despite my brain being shriveled from excessive dreams, I did three works today.

Read: Beesong Chronicles Omnibus vol 1: Sting & Song, Webs & Words, Hives & Heroism (Benjamin Medrano): For chaos god reasons, some fraction of the giant bees in a LitRPG world turn into beepeople. One of them gets kicked out of her hive, falls in with adventurers fighting against the Demon Lord, and is weird and cute and selfless and murdery and ace and bee-like for three books. The story is complete, but it’s labelled “vol 1” because the author hopes to write more.

Read: Hammered (Lindsay Buroker): A spinoff from the “Death Before Dragons” series, following another half-human Seattle resident who gets mixed up with interdimensional skullduggery when she just wants to renovate houses and have a normal life. Tragic backstory, magic weapons, elf-dwarf romantic tension.

Read: “How I Stole the Princess’s White Knight and Turned Him To Villainy: Miracle 1” (AJ Sherwood): A knight goes to an unlicensed sorcerer to help protect the people from the horrible princess, extravagant flirting ensues. The sorcerer is cute and eccentric in the best tradition of wizards who are so powerful they don’t have to care about dignity.

Watched: The Owl House 2.18-19: Revolt, revolt! OK!

Written: 319 kitten words. Too much reading, not enough writing.

I finally remembered to download an app for noise for sleeping instead of running the fan all night. Crackling fireplace noise was pleasant, but I don’t know how much it actually helped.

Watched: The Owl House 2.15-17: Flashbacks and also concrete information about King’s past. I was right about Belos.

Written: 170 kitten words, bringing me to around 12000 words for the month. That’s not as bad as I thought, even though most of them were not NaNoWriMo.

I have today off because in the original plan I was going to need it to recover after coming back from Roseville and I never changed my vacation plan. I meant to get up at a normal hour so I would be ready for tomorrow, but failed miserably. I did manage to do one thing, and then another thing, and finally the water is back on so I could take a shower and do dishes and stuff. I should not dread tomorrow, but I do.

Read: Illuminations (T Kingfisher): A young girl lives in a family of magic artists, who follow a tradition of painting practical enchantments into weird pictures, but some of their ancestors were more ambitious and did not follow safe disposal procedures. It has the T Kingfisher kids’ book feel, but it’s just not one of her strongest.

Watched: The Owl House 2-13-14: Luz and Amity are very cute but also kind of terrifying. Willow is pretty awesome too.

Written: 322 kitten words.

Today, the one thing I did was go over to the Gollubs’ to game and eat my body weight in cheese.

Water was still out all day.

Played: Dark Matter. Our castaways befriended two more factions, the Engineers and the Farmers, restored four whole books to the Library, checked out three books and had one of them immediately vanish, and collected a gang of kobolds who worship Jaseen. Then they broke into the mysterious room covered in warnings and craziness, and almost got the snot beat out of them by a giant metal skeleton and its radioactive ooze. Sesamina is still not getting anywhere with the librarian, but we probably have one more session this year.

Watched: The Owl House 2.11-12: Oh yeah, Luz and Amity are the cutest thing ever, and the emperor has a terrible plan. Also, I have a suspicion about the emperor’s background. And what happened to human solidarity?

Written: 101 kitten words, which is technically not nothing, but only technically.

Today, I did one thing! I went over to play Monster Game with Nonny and family. Then I stayed for food and also the first episode and a half of Wednesday. It wasn’t great, but I enjoyed it and was sad when I had to leave to catch the bus, and finished watching the episode on my own when I got home. Then I did no more things.

When I got home, the water was out, no ETA for a fix.

Written: 386 kitten words.

For a change, I didn’t have to get up early! Well, not earlier than usual, which still seems too early, except that if I stay in bed any longer, it’s definitely too late.

Read: “Skeleton Song” (Seanan McGuire): Another quick portal fantasy, full of love beyond death and spooky beauty.

Watched: Star vs the Forces of Evil 4.17-19: On the plus side, all plot all the time! On the downside, still the wrong ship.

Written: 649 NaNoWriMo words. Still not very many, but if I keep increasing at 300 words per day per day, I should finish in plenty of time! (That would be 18 days of writing, with the last day being 5400 words, which is totally an amount a real writer could do. Just not an amount I could do.)

Another early-morning meeting, bah. Also customers.

Read: Candy & Cigarettes vol 1 (Tomonori Inoue): A cop reaches mandatory retirement age but still needs an income stream for medical treatment for his grandkid, so doesn’t put up much fight when he gets recruited by the secret government agency in charge of murdering bad people and partnered with a terrifying 5th-grade assassin. It helps that all the targets are super-sleazy.

Read: Command Authority (Terry Mixon, JN Chaney): Fifth in the series. New discoveries continue to be made and tested without mounting a scratch battleship, the military continues to be entirely corrupt.

Watched: Star vs the Forces of Evil 4.15-16: What the heck, Hekapoo? Did you do that on purpose?

Written: 385 NaNoWriMo words, which is not even close to a NaNoWriMo day.

Someone I went to college with is now a grandparent. (Probably more are, but this one I still know!)

Also, it’s Halloween, so I saw a lot of costumes while I was out trying to run all my weekend errands, but although I had candy, no one came to get it.

Watched: Star vs the Forces of Evil 4.13-14: All hail the queen!

Written: FAIL, just stuff about Big Bad Con.

I did not manage to do anything at all useful today. I stayed in bed reading until well after noon, and didn’t leave the apartment all day. That would be fine if I were just vegatating for my vacation, but I should be getting ready to go to Big Bad Con tomorrow. I guess making sure my vaccination record is packed and also taking a picture of it counts as prep, but only barely. Fortunately I don’t have to be there until tomorrow afternoon.

Read: Bonds of Blood and Alpha Strike (Terry Mixon, JN Chaney): Having finally gotten their giant space battleship moving, the heroes now have to do extremely unwise stuff with it, so the opponents this time are mostly physics and time, with a bunch of politics and crime and even a little space combat.

Read: “Haley and the Spooky Dungeon” (Maggie Hogarth): Well, what kind of dungeon do you make at Halloween, if not a haunted house?

Watched: Star vs the Forces of Evil 4.11-12: That wasn’t suspicious at all, Eclipsa. Also, did Marco just deprive Mewni of most of its knights?

Written: More pointless notes, nothing else.

It’s like Friday, except I have to get all my customer cases in order to hand off to other people while I’m out. Also I had to get up too early for the weekly meeting.

Watched: Star vs the Forces of Evil 4.8-10: All Mewni politics all the time! Except the callback to when Marco and Star started getting shipped.

Read: The Last Hunter (Terry Mixon, JN Chaney): It’s a Missiles In Space setting, but the enemies for most of the book are neglect, corruption, and logistics. Points off for society, gender roles, etc being very C20, but still entertaining.

Written: More gaming notes, I guess. They’re very stupid and my game will be awful, though.

Today, the one thing I managed to accomplish was printing out character sheets and move references for the con. There’s still some folding that needs to happen, but together with the pens and pencils and index cards, I think the player supplies are sorted. If I were clever, I would have gotten dice, but it’s way too late for that now.

Watched: Star vs the Forces of Evil 4.5-7: Gee, it’s almost as if restitution isn’t popular with the colonizers. But Kelly seems pretty cool.

Read: Black & White: Tough Love At The Office vol 1 (Sal Jiang): Up-and-coming corporate rivals Shirakawa and Kuroda have to work together while plotting against each other, but when they’re working late, their rivalry devolves into fist-fights and extremely rough lesbian sex. It’s not really my kink, but I’m hoping they’ll get married and become masked avengers beating up all the high-ranking men in the corporate world, or something like that.

Written: 370 kitten words.

I did not have to get up earlier than usual today, but I still had to get up. Hmph.

Watched: Star vs the Forces of Evil 4.2-4: Now we know more about Eclipsa’s moral compass.

Read: Hitomi-chan is Shy With Strangers vol 5 (Chorisuke Natsumi): A very slice-of-life volume in which not much happens except that Usa finds Hitomi’s hotness very distracting.

Written: 316 kitten words.

Had to get up early and go into the office today so we could have a team lunch with boss3 S. The office was just as hot and inconveniently located as usual, but I was able to hide in a conference most of the time and mostly avoid humans and their virus-spewing face-holes. I also drank canned coffee milkshake stuff that was probably very bad for me.

Apparently boss3 is persona non grata in Switzerland after running afoul of their draconian anti-speeding regime, which I would not have known if I hadn’t come into the office today.

I cleverly (not really) got pizza on the way home and watched TV with Marith, which was definitely better than being in an office.

Watched: Mob Psycho 100 3.1-2: Uh oh, Mob is thinking about his future. That can’t be good for Reigen’s business!

Read: Fluff (RavensDagger): LitRPG but superhero instead of D&D. An extremely anxious and repressed college freshman gets superpowers, gets randomly assigned to be a straight-up villain, and discovers that her power is summon little sisters who have actual powers. It’s all sideways from there.

Written: 214 kitten words.

Had to get up early for another meeting, although at least this one isn’t repeating. It also wasn’t that useful, possibly because I reject the very notion of being a leader.

Watched: Helluva Boss 2.2, 1.0-5: Ugh, the new episode, although probably beloved of Loovia fans, is not at all good. Did the new writer even watch the preceding episodes? I had to go back and rewatch some to remember just how sordid and bizarre and hyper it’s supposed to be.

Read: Komi Can’t Communicate vol 21 (Tomohito Oda): Komi abroad! A little more of Komi and Rumiko’s friendship, but not one of the more exciting volumes.

Written: 636 kitten words, somehow.

Ate so much banana bread today. Also cheese.

Played: Dark Matter episode 5. As usual, Jeremy apologized for not having an adventure and then it was pretty great. This time, our hapless PCs met two new factions (the Bridge Crew and the Librarian, who is a faction all by herself), were almost eaten by spiders, accidentally damaged several books, were almost eaten by kobolds and alligators, seized a plasma launcher +1 for one of the gadgeteers to integrate into their exoskeleton, and brought a book back to the library in triumph. LEVEL UP. One of my characters finds the Librarian horrifying and thinks she’s probably a system of oppression all by herself, the other finds her moderately terrifying but apparently is into that. Next session, they have shake down the door guards for late library books and also go to the Farm to get materials to repair the books that were damaged in the Great Spider Fight. Also there was banana bread.

Watched: Star vs the Forces of Evil 3.21, 4.1: That was arguably the right thing for Star to do, but I think they’re treating the legitimacy of the monarchy as more of a thing than it deserves.

Written: 565 kitten words.

I did manage to go grocery shopping, eventually, but that’s about all I accomplished today.

Watched: Star vs the Forces of Evil 3.9: Okay, those princesses weren’t so terrible. That time.

Read: Exile and Refuge (Glynn Stewart): First two of a series I had not previously read, seem like earlier works. Dissidents and rebels have to set up their own society on an unknown but suspiciously habitable world and deal with all the things they find in their new section of the galaxy.

Written: 424 kitten words. I need to get my act together for NaNoWriMo, though.

I meant to get up early and go grocery shopping in plenty of time for going to see Jus’s soccer game, but none of that came to pass. Then I was on call all afternoon, and customers rudely wanted me to fix their problems. It wasn’t intense work, but anything else beyond pad games and light reading wouldn’t have worked well anyway. Bah.

I didn’t have anything else I wanted to sign up for, so I forgot, but the final round of signups for Big Bad Con was tonight. I’m up to four people in my Friday session and five in my Saturday session, so I better get this glass mountain filled with [SPOILER] and [SPOILER] and DOOM.

I don’t know whether it was the weird mayo-chicken-salad filling of the arepa I ate tonight or the ranch dressing I put on my chicken nuggets last night, but for a bit it looked like it was going to be a sad night. Fortunately it cleared out quickly and I did not have to spend the night with my forehead on the cool bathroom counter.

Read: Spy x Family vol 8 (Tatsuya Endo): An army of hit men trapped on a cruise ship with Yor. That’s definitely going to end poorly for someone.

Watched: Star vs the Forces of Evil 3.4-8: Wait, wasn’t that the end? No, apparently Marco has to be a doofus and also the writers have to ship him with Star for no good reason. Hmph.

Written: 330 kitten words.

Huh, Friday.

Watched: Star vs the Forces of Evil 2.22, 3.1-3: No more hanging around Echo Creek having teenaged hijinx, it’s all Mewni adventure now! Also, new opening and closing and more tadpoles.

Read: Chapter 8 of “Rodeo Clown“: No death can be so impending that Blitzo and Stolas will keep their pants on.

Written: 274 kitten words. Remember when my daily goal was 250 and I made it almost every day? Me neither.

How is it already only Thursday? Why has nothing useful happened this entire week?

Read: The Genesis of Misery (Neon Yang): Star travel and mecha based on mysterious artifacts and substances, excellent. Declaring them holy, making a Catholic-style religion around them, and murdering everybody who regards them in a different light… yep, humans suck. In fact, almost all the characters are pretty terrible, including the MC. Sure, she honestly believes that she’s the next messiah, but everyone around her believes it too, and history shows us how that goes. It looks like the next book will be a lot more about her enemies, which honestly seem somewhat less terrible, so I’ll probably read it.

Watched: Star vs the Forces of Evil 2.18-21: There’s starting to be more plot, not just wackiness.

Written: 383 kitten words.