Month: April 2025

Musk is doing his best to make it suck, but his shitshow is transient.

Once again slept until 1030, then got up and did some shopping.

Ken gave us delicious chicken adobo (probably not cockatrice), and we talked to Ayse about kitchen history because Dave was surprised at the lack of kitchens in Ptolus apartments. It was a nice visit.

Watched (anime): Delicious in Dungeon 8-9: The undine, and the gnomes and Nomari. So far this seems to be following the manga pretty closely.

Read (manga): Asumi-chan is Interested in Lesbian Brothels! vol 2 (Kuro Ituski): A near-miss with meeting the girl she’s looking for, so she has to have a threesome and cosplay instead. Still completely lacking in redeeming social value.

Written (catgirl): 437 more of worldbuilding notes, but mostly lists of names.

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.

That’s probably what we call YA now?

Didn’t go to the office since I had to catch incoming cases in the morning and didn’t want to risk being late from commute failure (even though that rarely happens) and also because I am very lazy and stupid and useless.

Read (manga): Asumi-chan is Interested in Lesbian Brothels! vol 1 (Kuro Itsuki): College student Asumi’s very “helpful” senpai mentions that her childhood crush who she has never gotten over may be working as a lesbian prostitute, and encourages her to take the obvious approach to finding her. Completely lacking in socially redeeming value.

Written (catgirl): 107, but I have once again reached the point where everything is stupid and wrong and I should start over, maybe this time with proper worldbuilding and not so many superpowers and thinking about characters ahead of time. Or maybe just give up forever, it’s not like any of this is going to ever amount to anything. Ghosts on an Alien Wind did the other genre with underlying cosmic horror much better than I could anyway.

I presume they mean the color, not the performer, but who can say?

Went to the office, had the room to myself because Coworker D is out until next week, ate fried chicken guys, was very sleepy, did a small amount of work.

Read (manga): The Tree of Death: Yomotsuhegui vol 3 (Masasumi Kakizaki): Finally, the boss battle! Also difficult decisions, personality erosion, terrible revelations, etc. The End.

Read (novel): Ghosts on an Alien Wind (Moe Lane): Just a few hundred years before humans developed interstellar travel, everybody in the galaxy was wiped out, leaving dead, hella creepy worlds that could have been full of friends but now have only unknown dangers, nigh-incomprehensible tech, and creeping madness. It’s SF adventure with cosmic horror beneath it, which pleases me greatly. Also the [SPOILER] are real [SPOILER], which is amazing.

Read (manga): I Can’t Say No to the Lonely Girl vol 6 (Kashikaze): They finally come out to their friends, everything is great, the end!

Written (catgirl): 170.

Libraries are the best.

Played (Changeling the Lost): Berkeley 1994. We had no Kelsey, but our (new?) rule is that we’ll play if only one person is missing and it’s not the GM. This session, Everett gets his old job at the railroad back (Brookes rolled like eight successes!), Theophania goes to The Other Change of Hobbit to research horror magazines she could submit and covers for Longfingers sneaking upstairs to find a Hedge door and then meeting the fabled Simple John, Beth, and Mary, then Theophania and Thessaly follow the currents of magic through a theater basement and an abandoned 70s department store and find a one-way(?) pool of water(?) which leads to an abandoned grotto full of magical power (which they suck up for +1 Wyrd and full Glamour recharge each). There we leave them, alone in an extradimensional hideout with only bed. What will happen next week?

Read (short): The Knight and the Butcherbird (Alix E Harrow): Post-apocalyptic monster-hunting knight meets immovable librarian, discoveries about the new world are made.

Read (manga): The Tree of Death: Yomotsuhegui vol 2 (Masasumi Kakizaki): Our Cthulhoid undying ex-cop (really, that character design cannot be an accident) has been helping the shinigami and her mysterious blob for a year, and the enemy is finally closing in and using his connections to mortal life against him.

Written (catgirl): 111.

I’d say this one is for Despoo, but actually beavers are being reintroduced in Britain, which is pretty cool.

I did a small amount of work, but the cats really wanted to help.

Read (manga): Adachi and Shimamura vol 1 (Moke Yuzuhara, Hitoma Iruma, Non): Two schoolgirls end up hiding out in the same spot when cutting class, become friends, etc.

Read (novel): Hell to Pay (Rachel Aaron): I thought this was going to be the end of the war against Gilgamesh the King of Heaven, but no, it’s the huge plot twist where everything gets much much worse. Also, listen to the cat!

Written (catgirl): 137.

Don’t drive when you’re sleepy!

Also Jump Over Things Day, which is just Walk Around Things Day in a different plane, and also something you should not do while driving.

Did some shopping, did some more shopping.

Read (manga): After God vol 3 (Sumi Eno): Main Character is depressed because trying to live her life got a bunch of people killed, but turns out in this world, people still get killed even when she hides in the underground base. Also, some explanation of the gods, but it doesn’t really explain much of anything, so maybe that’s for the best. It’s all horrifying and possibly non-Euclidian, though, and definitely squamous.

Read (short): “Albert and the Water-Horse” (Chameleons All In Vermillion): Of all the ways meeting a mysterious violin-playing woman on the wave-washed beach could go, that’s actually near the top.

Written (catgirl): 148.

If only! We could use a nice alien conquest about now.

Slept in as usual but instead of grocery shopping, I went to the rally downtown because seriously, fuck all those motherfuckers. The crowd was pretty old overall, but there were a few youngsters, so perhaps there is hope for the future. I tried leaving my phone behind, not because I expected trouble today, but to see if it worked, and yeah, it was fine. I think I was the only one who did, though.

Ayse is back from her expedition to Nashville, with bonus tornadoes. Er, stories of tornadoes, she did not bring any actual tornadoes.

Watched (anime): Delicious in Dungeon 6-7: The one where they eat a mimic, and the one where they eat a kraken.

Read (manga): After God vol 2 (Sumi Eno): Less bizarre than the volume that introduced the weird elements, as is inevitable, but more gods and people getting massacred unexpectedly and even more gods and creepy powers and creepy people.

Written (catgirl): 157.

Rats can be cute!

Also Walk Around Things Day, which I guess is for people who normally walk through things?

Read (novel): The Valkyrie Stratagem (Glynn Stewart): Third in the series of civil war (no caps) x missiles in space. The king candidate who escaped the massacre is on the way back with her new allies and new boyfriend, despite the general lack of helpfulness from Earth, but of course it cannot be that easy.

Read (graphic novel): Grimoire Noir (Vera Greentea, Yana Bogatch): A boy in a small sepia town where all the girls are witches tries to figure out what happened to his little sister while the town floods due to his mother’s magical tears, with some help from his estranged, hovering, bestie. Quite a few secrets come to light in the process, as is appropriate to the genre.

Written (catgirl): 267. I think this scene getting bogged down, or maybe was unnecessary from the beginning.

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.

Another one that’s illegal now, I guess. Also National Walking Day, International Children’s Books Day, and National Ferret Day.

Went to the office, ate some vegetarian curry and flatbread after figuring out which unlabeled lunch was mine, did a work.

Read (novel): To The Bloody End (Rachel Aaron): Conclusion of the faerie vs blood mage in magic cyberpunk Detroit trilogy. Despite gaining immense power in the second book, our heroine still has to figure out how to use it in nonstandard ways to save the world.

Read (manga): God Bless the Mistaken vol 4 (Nakatani Nio): Conclusion of this story about people in a world where reality randomly changes every day. Although does a slice-of-life story have an actual conclusion?

Written (game design): 125.