Pretty sure Thanksgiving food is not the route to longevity.
Everybody except Dave and I went back to San Jose today, because they have to prep the kids/be prepped for school on Monday. Dave and I stayed to play Martian Rails (I am so bad at Crayon Rail games) and Waterdeep with Undermountain (again), which meant we got to see Kate. I forgot how great Kate is, she pretends my jokes are funny! Went to bed around midnight again.
Read: VACATION
Written: VACATION
I did some of that! Also I bought nothing (possibly because I was far away from the computer I use for shopping, but it still counts).
Ate way too many waffles, admired Non’s racing game tracks (because it’s 2024 and kids can just construct 3D environments on their notepads), played Everdell with the tree replacement expansion and Settlers of Catan and Lords of Waterdeep (again) and Holiday Fluxx, ate too many leftovers, played SPANC again because Ayse didn’t get to play last time, managed to get to bed not long after midnight. I’m sensing some themes to this vacation.
Read: VACATION.
Written: VACATION.
Happy Thanksgiving!
There was a lot of cooking, which I was completely useless for, but I did some of the eating. So much Thanksgiving food! Also played Takenoko and went to bed at a sensible time.
Read: Beware of Chicken vol 4 (Casualfarmer): We finally get backstory on the major conflict of the setting, but also a lot of coziness.
Read: VACATION.
Written: VACATION.
Turtles deserve loving homes too!
I was inept so we didn’t get going until after 9, but it was still early enough to miss the vast majority of the traffic and make it to Roseville by noon. Yay friends! Yay toddler!
Played Lords of Waterdeep with Undermountain, and SPANC (which I got a new copy of after having lost my original copy on a train platform many years ago), ate the traditional Chinese food, visited the gaming store which had only corporate and vintage RPGs, went to bed by midnight.
Read: VACATION.
Written: VACATION.
Good grief, why am I so useless?
Slept way in again, ran a few errands, ate a Thai food for dinner, snuggled a cat, wrote a journal, did a little packing.
Read: I Can’t Belive I Slept With You vol 2 (Miyako Miahara): Tenant is still doing “favors” for Landlady, but she really doesn’t mind and might even be catching feelings. After the first volume I thought the favors might have stopped short of third base, but no, definitely steamy.
Watched: Helluva Boss 2.10: Millie is the best, so great she can even make Blitzø suck less! Also apparently she can kill anything.
Written: 210. I’m now over 30k total, which should be somewhere between a full story (novella) and a big chunk of story (novel), so apparently I need to go back and take a bunch of words out to get a higher density of story.
I have one of those! I need a new one, though. Possibly also a better head.
Did some work, but I’m on vacation for a week so I didn’t take on any new work.
Read: It’s Just Not My Night vol 1-3 (Muchimaro): A vampire queen busy conquering her world is accidentally flung to modern Japan and stripped of her vampire powers and imposing form. Raunchy hijinks ensue as she fails to grasp Earth culture, creepily over-devoted followers show up, loan sharks take her for everything she’s worth, etc. Looks like only three volumes were ever published.
Written: 243.
Nice for those people who have talents, I guess.
Played: Librarians Errant. Reshelving Squad Upsilon is notified that a forbidden tome, On Putting Things Back the Way They Never Were, has been stolen from where it was misfiled. The only clue is the mysterious phrase BODASHUS COW in red paint behind the now-empty bookshelf (apparently unrelated to Beasley Knees and his Cow of Ill Repute). Although not assigned specifically to look for the missing book, the squad does check with their underworld contact Tokda Snir, who is aware of two other BODASHUS COW thefts, involving all the food from a dorm kitchen, and all the feathers from a turkey. When questioned, the turkey claims to know nothing, but there were huge saurian footprints all around the scene of plucking. With not many clues and no mandate, the squad decides to go back down into undercity and look for the halfling who was spying on their friends the kobolds, which so far has been intermittently painful but extremely lucrative. This time, they find a trapdoor that drops them into a wave-battered sea cave where a black dragon lairs with her mud mephit retainers and a black ooze garbage disposal. Daisy rejects the squad’s sincere apologies, so there is nothing to do but fight. It is the way of the world. As it turns out, since both Thaïs and Grim know banishing magic, the major threat is not from the dragon, the slow-moving ooze, or the splattery mephits, but from the huge waves that fill the cave every quarter-minute or so. Despite the environmental hazards, and possible future complications due to the idiosyncracies of Thaïs’s whirlwind of banishment, the squad prevails and makes off with Daisy’s treasure of a handful of potions and several statues of herself.
Read: Versus vol 1 (ONE, Kyoutarou Azuma, bose): Humanity is being overwhelmed by the demons, so the wizards hatch a plan to use a planet-size summoning circle to connect with another world and get help. Too bad the people they contact are not in a position to help…
Read: After God vol 1 (Sumi Eno): Japan is invaded by beautiful monsters that kill humans by their mere presence. Thirty years later, a girl with a mysterious power falls in with a team of crazed researchers bent on defeating the monsters without regard for IRBs. Looks like there’s going to be plenty of body horror.
Read: The War of Greedy Witches vol 1 (Homura Kawamoto, Makoto Shiozuka): Thirty-two women from history, redrawn as cheesecake with deliberately one-dimensional personalities, in a fight to the gratuitously gory death for the amusement of the half-dressed demon queen.
Written: 116.
I have some suggestions for time travel…
Did all the usual sleeping in, shopping, being super-useless, etc. Only read one manga today despite it being a weekend. Also didn’t do great during commute, so perhaps I should just say it’s one every day, and more if I can manage it. I don’t want reading to be a chore!
Watched: Deca-Dence 5-7: It is so weird seeing the cartoon robot guys doing hard time. It’s still not even clear to me that they have physical form, they might just be chrooted.
Read: I’m In Love With The Villainess vol 7 (Aonoshimo, Inori, Hanagata): Now someone is in love with the main character, possibly due to revolutionary sympathies, which is not what she wanted, but the villainess might be jealous, so that’s progress. Also, our main character stands up to homophobia, so good for her!
Read: Song of the Forever Rains (EJ Mellow): She has scary magic powers and a secret identity, he has an abusive uncle and a dutiful streak, together they have a complicated relationship to crime. I’m not sure if it’s a high-magic world overall, but her childhood mentor has a small cottage on the bridge between the worlds of living and dead, there are remnants of the vanished gods all over, etc. I didn’t mind that it was a het romantasy.
Written: 158
I sure don’t want to be part of this one, anyway.
Read: Girlmode (Magdalene Visaggio, Paulina Ganucheau): A new trans girl gets adopted by the popular girls who are cooler than expected, but still full of internalized misogyny and goes through some social circles to find a way to be a girl that’s not horrible and not full of horrible boys.
Written: 214
<code>Hello, world!</code>
Went to the office, did some work, ate some hummus pita chicken shawarma.
Read: This Used to Be About Dungeons vol 1 (Alexander Wales): I guess it’s litRPG? There’s no popups, though, the world is just arranged into 12-mile hexes with one dungeon per hex, parties with intraparty chat can be formed by a simple spell everyone knows, etc. I guess it’s diegetic litRPG? Anyway, it’s weird. The party is one guy and four girls, but it doesn’t seem likely to turn into a harem as nobody has chemistry with the guy and some of the girls already have crushes on each other.
Read: Delicious in Dungeon vol 12-14 (Ryoko Kui): Read the last three volumes all at once because gaaaaah. Climactic confrontations! All the side characters are back! Everything is almost doomed! But Laios’s love of monsters saves the day! Epilogue! That was quite something.
Written: 237.
Observe and remember while it’s still legal.
Went to the office, ate tofu bibimbap (needed more tofu), did a work or something.
Read: Delicious in Dungeon vol 11 (Ryoko Kui): A lot of stuff happened and now everything is a huge mess. It’s great.
Written: 212.
Haven’t seen it in years, no idea if it would hold up.
Read: Delicious in Dungeon vol 10 (Ryoko Kui): I couldn’t hold out for commuting tomorrow, I had to read it today. Did those come from Monty Python, or was it independent invention? Also, sus guy is sus.
Read: The Brain Leeches and Other Eldritch Phenomena (Tim Curran): Mythos or mythos-adjacent horror stories. As is only proper, they end with the protagonist going mad and getting eaten/transformed/fertilized by the monster, or the protagonist being revealed to be a cultist. They tend toward similar structure and long passages of hallucinatory experience on the way to the implantation pits, so they don’t show to best advantage all together like this. The ones I have previously read in multi-author anthologies were satisfying.
Played: Changeling, kind of. We did not have Kelsey, so we just talked about vices and virtues and one unique things (which are not actually a thing in this system but will let Ken know what kind of changeling things to give us.
Written: 159.
Time to start working on a princess quest for next year, I guess. This one should be less pirates and more strange, possibly candy-related, magic, I guess?
Had a long customer call at work, so I guess I have justified my existence.
Dave tried to buy train tickets for next week, but Amtrak is sold out! Good for them, I guess, but nobody expected that! We will have to drive after all.
Finally my backordered volume 10 of Delicious in Dungeon arrived. I will save it for commuting later this week instead of reading it immediately, though.
Read: Dandadan vol 7-8 (Yukinobu Tatsu): They may be defeating evil, but everyone they annoy is going to come back to haunt them constantly for the rest of the series.
Written: 145. I would like to be able to do 200 on days where my evening isn’t busy, but sometimes the brain just doesn’t.
Yay Nightvale!
Did some more shoppings, avoided a bookstore accident, deliquesced.
The new cat bed I got is very popular. Maybe I should get another one next time I go to the cat supply store.
My plan of reading two volumes of my infinite stack of manga every weekend day and every commute day, and one volume every other day seems to be working so far, but it will be a long time before all these unread volumes are moved to the pile of read volumes, never mind bagged up and taken to the used book store.
Read: Bloody Sweet vol 4 (NaRae Lee): FInal volume, in which wrongs are righted, feelings are expressed, etc. Sad epilogue!
Read: Dandadan vol 6 (Yukinobu Tatsu): More surreal cryptid battle, but now there’s a yokai they have to take care of and so many weird characters and everything is ridiculous.
Read: Girl Squad Volcanic (Maya Lin Wang): Back to Fascist Planet, much darker hints about the future, despair, possible smooches, gender-bending, school dance, OP opposition.
Written: 208.
I ate a different (yet still monstrously unhealthy) sandwich at Togo’s, I think that counts.
Also International Games Day and Have a Party With Your Bear Day. Maybe I need to get a bear to help me with game design. “Roll for Salmon.”
Did some shoppings, got some hairs cut, let the cats out to sniff the balcony for a while. Maybe I should get them a tent.
Went over for anime, but did not get to tease Jus about her multiple wives and concubines as she was only there for a moment between social engagements.
Watched: Deca-Dence 2-4: Male lead backstory, training montage, automail upgrade, world game events, etc.
Read: A Sinner of the Deep Sea vol 1 (Akihito Tomi): A punk mermaid’s best friend gets arrested for consorting with a human, political uproar, a quest to enable true love etc.
Read: Magilumiere Magical Girls Inc vol 4 (Sekka Iwata, Yu Aoki): It’s the modern age, so you don’t get richer by expanding your own business, you get richer by licensing your technology and training new characters in it.
Written: 291. Is mean of me to thwart my character’s attempt at playing Mata Hari? (No, she’s 13, she’s lucky she can meet somebody for coffeee without dying.)
I mean, I don’t not, I just wish I had any actual talent, or a working brain.
Coworker M is no longer with us, for unclear reasons, which sucks. Now I have to do all the middle-aged-American-white-guying around here.
Finally did the work thing I have been alternately struggling with and flaking on for ages, which leads directly to another task that I am putting off until Monday.
Read: Operation Endgame (JN Chaney, Terry Mixon): The end! Did not turn around the decline of interestingness, alas. The enemies were vanquised in straight-up battle, all named characters survived, etc, etc.
Read: Bacchanal (Veronica G Henry): A Black girl with secret magical powers falls in with a supernatural carnival traveling the South in the 1930s, pursued and befriended by supernatural creatures of African origin and/or Black people with magic. Cameo by an historical Black lady gangster of the time.
Written: 214. These words aren’t as bad, but they aren’t doing anybody any good.
What an age! How is it even possible?!
Slept so badly I could not make myself go into the office. I hope my chicken tacos went to feeding the hungry, but food is definitionally biodegradable in any case.
Read: Daemons of the Shadow Realm vol 6 (Hiromu Arakawa): More intrigue and night-time assaults on fortified positions and betrayals and finding out why that guy is in charge.
Read: Chainsaw Man vol 5 (Tatsuki Fujimoto): Ah, young lust! Will our protagonist ever learn to stop being led around by his hormones? It’s only volume 5, so there’s plenty of time for him to stop being 16, but it might still take a time skip.
Read: Girl Squad Volition (Maya Lin Wang): Off to magical girl school, with unnecessarily full-contact training, teenage feelings, missions to the planet of Fascists Who Gonna Fash, mysterious strangers, hints about the future, and acrophobia.
Read: Fängelsehåla (Garry Snow): Supposed to be an RPG with rules as simple as Ikea instructions, which, well, okay. Also cute Ikea aesthetic, and trolls. You stack up up dice for the damage you take until they collapse, at which point you do too.
Written: 165, but this scene is not working for me. At least I’m not trying to get other people to pay to read this dreck.
We could use a lot more of that around here, especially in voters.
Went to the office, Coworker D was also masking because he’s sick and not American, ate a brisket sandwich, did a work.
Read: Otherside Picnic vol 11 (Iori Miyazawa, Eita Mizuno, Shirakaba): Humans, as always, are the biggest pain to deal with, even when they aren’t technically monsters.
Read: Heretical Fishing vol 3 (Haylock Jobson): There’s still some fluffiness (er, shelliness?) and it’s cranked up to 11, but also the forces of repression are growing ever-more-horrible and need dealt with.
Written: 105.
If only they had managed to take the vote away from men as well…
Read: Demon World Boba Shop vol 4 (RC Joshua): It’s the tower defense episode! Can they make it through the wave? And what about smooching? Or breakfast delivery?
Played: Changeling: the Lost. Nobody needs any more descriptions of horror this month, so we skipped straight to the jailbreak and our hapless changelings are now in a cemetery in the East Bay, being lectured by a creepy guy who doesn’t want them to go back for the friend they had to leave behind for the moment. Also apparently everything is terrible but being in Berkeley will be less terrible. Or something.
Written: 137. No guillotines in this story so far, but then I set it in 2014 specifically so I could avoid engaging with the bullshit of 2016 and onward.
Also World Origami Day, Red Lipstick Day, Pocky Day, National Sundae Day, and several other things that don’t seem to go with the main theme of the day.
There was rain this morning, which was good because I didn’t have to be out in it!
Read: Daughters of Nri (Reni K Amayo): West African epic fantasy about magic twins separated at birth, an evil emperor, etc.
Read: Demon World Boba Shop vol 3 (RC Joshua): Isekai hero troublemaker catalyst and all his friends try to get their frontier town set up while being extremely nice. It’s not even as hard as it sounds, but it is very heartwarming.
Written: 254.
Fortunately, Waterdhavian frogs do not get the bonus today.
After way too long, we played Librarians Errant again. Although in fact both Reshelving Squad Upsilon and Gladys’s musketeers are playing the exchange completely straight, as soon as they meet at the ice cream shop, everything goes off the rails. Poison-skinned bullywug acrobats launch themselves through the store window from mangonels and immediately trampoline back out with the books in their sticky fingers. Fortunately, Thaïs is also stuck to the books, so the bullywug escape doesn’t make it as far as planned. The bullywug Grand Admiral Bigbugs and his henchfrogs appear, and moments later, Celsian mercenary librarians rappel down from their airship to join the battle. The books change hands a few times, mostly remaining also in the appendages of the Celsians’ invisible stalker, various bullywugs are defeated, the airship is set aflame and has to be evacuated, a froghemoth crawls up from the sewers to provide an additional obstacle (not necessarily to anybody specific, just in general), until after three rounds of this, one of the musketeers gets hold of the books and makes his escape with skedaddling magic. With the objects of contention gone, the combatants disperse and/or get arrested, but later the musketeers do return the promised original of vol 2 to the reshelving squad. Level UP!
Written: 297.
If only!
I was going to do my writing early and go to anime and see friends, but instead I am sitting at home fossicking through my email and being very stupid, and also feeling guilty because all I do is give money to orgs. I have never punched a Nazi in my life.
Written: 243.
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.
Went to the office, there were some coworkers there, we had some meetings, I ate a Reuben that wasn’t bad and did a little bit of work. Also, everything is fucked.
Read: A Line in the Stars (Sean Fenian): Conclusion of the trilogy about the thinly-disguised self-insert for the neurodivergent geek author who gets an alien space factory to serve as a decoy for alien jerks and builds Earth a space navy. Finally the catastrophe that the navy is for arrives, and things do not go as expected for anyone.
Read: Peach Boy Riverside vol 6-8 (coolkyousinnjya): There are getting to be a lot of factions involved in this, and now Mikoto is going off after his own psychlims. Surely this will be fine.
Written: 194.
Fortunately I did not have to interact with anyone in person at work, and was able to refrain from typing, “So how about those local Nazi motherfuckers, eh?” into a corporate slack.
Read: Library System Reset: Damaged (KT Hanna): Further litRPG adventures of a college student in the magical library, and we finally find out why her, why the library is so messed up, etc. Now they just need to do something about it.
Read: Kaina of the Great Snow Sea vol 2-3 (Tsutomu Nihei, Itoe Takemoto): Too many male characters, the princess never does anything except get rescued.
Read: Lion on Loan (Zoe Chant): First of Kit’s new shapeshifters-in-Ireland series. Had too much oligarchy, alas.
Written: 175.
I’m not a particularly great person, I’m not that politically engaged, I don’t go out of my way to be aware of world events, so how is a majority of the country not just worse than me, but so much worse than me? What the actual fuck is wrong with people?
Read: Echoes of the Imperium (Nicholas Atwater, Olivia Atwater): Steampunk fantasy in a world with faeries for gods, found-family smuggler airship crew, ace main character, the empire was overthrown for good reason, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t serve a purpose.
Written: 110, somehow.
Well, does Godot speak Greek?
Weekly meditation on how I don’t hate Monday, I hate capitalism.
Dropped off my ballot one whole day before the election. Go me.
Read: Counting by 7s (Holly Goldberg Sloan): A middle school girl who is probably on the spectrum or otherwise definitely neurospicy loses her adoptive parents and while semi-catatonic from grief has to cobble together a new family from whoever is to hand (school counselor, sister of the boy with the counseling appointment before hers, cab driver, etc). It is kind of weird with multiple viewpoints and coincidences and stuff, but heartwarming.
Written: 360, but most of that was deleting old stuff that was getting in the way of the doom.
Jellyfish don’t care about your time change.
Managed to buy cat supplies, but that’s about it. You’d think I would be full of energy after getting an hour back, but have you met me? And have you met this cat pinning me under the blankets?
Did fill out my ballot, based mostly on the Equality California endorsements and Vote411.
Read: Must Be Tuesday (Erika Chappell): The RPG for the general case of Buffy the Vampire Slayer: no serial numbers, but you are high school students who are also monsters, and monsters of all kinds keep showing up to cause problems that you have to deal with, because who else is going to? There are mechanics for task resolution, sure, but the important part is balancing your human-to-monster track, because if you run off either end, you become an NPC. Not sure how it would work in practice, since pretty much every roll affects the track in some way, it would be very non-immersive.
Read: Games For Freaks vol 1 (Tom Bloom): Expansion material for Maleghast and CAIN, which I’ve never played, and I don’t even have any particular interest in the former since it’s a wargame, but the author sure makes them sound cool. Possibly, like Lancer, the flavor text is the only part that’s at all interesting.
Written: 236
Also World Numbat Day and Practice Being Psychic Day. I, for one, welcome our psychic numbat overlords, especially if they bribe me with deviled eggs.
Sage kept me pinned under the blankets until forever, but finally I managed to wiggle out and feed her and go shopping and stuff. When I got home, I finished journaling the con, so hopefully I can stay more caught up. But mostly, I accomplish nothing.
Watched: Bungo Stray Dogs 25: This was actually an OAV after the end of season 2, which is why it didn’t connect to anything. But now we’re out of BSD.
Watched: Deca-Dence 1: Okay, that’s ridiculous, but no more than many– wait, what?
Read: Wandering Crows (John Lynch): I played this at the con, but of course we didn’t have a chance to read the whole book. 8 1/2 minutes of exposition and then it was time to make characters. That was in fact most of what we needed to know as players, so that was fine, but my uncertainty about Inventory was never really settled, and now I know that it’s very fuzzy. It looks like what’s in your inventory can be used as an excuse to use a different suit than normal for a challenge, but mostly seem to be flavor, which I don’t like. I understand that everything is flavor and only the suits really affect challenges, but meh. I would be happier with narrative permission or something.
Written: 204.
Hi Kit!
More customer calls today, but at least I could do them from my own pit, with a black cat on top of me. (I don’t know why Nightvale was suddenly the snuggly one today, but no complaints.)
Read: I Can’t Say No to the Lonely Girl vol 4 (Kashikaze): Yay smooches! Shifting focus to another couple, maybe? Probably not that one, but maybe there will be more.
Read: There’s No Freaking Way I’ll Be Your Lover! Unless… vol 6 (Musshu, Teren Mikami, Eku Takeshima): Gaah, MC, just admit you’re super-gay already and revel in the number of exceptionally hot girls who are into you! (Internalized heteronormativity is a hell of a drug, as they say.)
Written: 230.