Author: Trip the Space Parasite

One for Jus.

I did not go into the office today, because I am lame, but I did do a few works and will go back tomorrow.

Coworker L tested positive for Covid today. I wasn’t sitting directly next to him at dinner, though, should be fine.

Added some more flatness to my domain and also refinished the tunnel to the Nether portal, but did not find much in the way of blackstone. Maybe I should just start tunneling down and see what I find.

Finished writing up Opal Fossil, Earth Genasi Rune Knight, for Kelsey’s D&D game.

Read: Scarlett Hart: Monster Hunter (Marcus Sedgwick, Thomas Taylor): Underage Victorian monster hunter hunts monsters while her rival tries get proof that it’s her and not her adult butler doing the hunting.

Written: 178.

Possibly there are cats who would enjoy that, but I don’t think mine would.

Monday is my day to work late, so I usually also start late, but there was an early all-hands that seemed to mostly be an excuse for the CEO to be big mad at people who don’t come into the office enough. Then I had a meeting with a customer that turned out to be scheduled exactly so I couldn’t make it into the office between the meetings. After that, the train was late, and the moment I got into the office to find my desk had been taken over (by either my boss or boss’s boss so it wasn’t like I could shove everything onto the floor) and no one else in my team was in, a special case came in and none of the floater desks had any spare power outlets for the special case laptop. I was very cross.

After that things settled down, but then we had a team dinner because boss and boss’s boss are in town, which wasn’t bad, but it was a lot of people inside a restaurant and I didn’t escape until almost 21:00, so I got home at practically bedtime.

Read: Witch of Thistle Castle vol 3 (John Tarachine): I guess random violence at a school is more shocking in the UK (or Japan)?

Read: The Inconvenient Life of an Arousing Priestess (Makino Maebaru, Hachi Uehara): Healing magic sends the life energies into overdrive, with predictable effects. Instead of realizing this means the gods approve of sex, the main character’s homeland has gone all in on patriarchy, double standards, etc, but fortunately she falls in with someone from a better country after she gets exiled and gets to show how extremely amazing she is at every aspect of anti-monster operations.

Read: The Splendid Work of a Monster Maid vol 3 (Yugata Tanabe): Further adventures of monster maids in Spookytown looking for lost magic.

Written: 238 somehow.

Slept in a bunch, because on-call doesn’t start until 13 o’clock, then watched the notifications while branch mining a bunch more of the bowels of the earth and finally making a full set of diamond armor and a diamond sword. Now if only I had the levels to enchant them…

Also caught up a little on journaling. I should probably just make draft posts instead of keeping notes in /tmp.

Read: “The Sound of Children Screaming” (Rachael K Jones): It’s like the Madoka Magica of child portal fiction.

Read: “How to Raise a Kraken in Your Bathtub” (P Djèlí Clark): That is such a supervillain plan. I hope the kraken is okay with it, though.

Read: “Better Living Through Algorithms” (Naomi Kritzer): “What if AI, but not evil?” It’s retreading ground that was visited decades ago (not that I can find the story because web searching is a thing of the past) but it’s even more relevant today, so that’s fine.

Read: “The Mausoleum’s Children” (Aliette de Bodard): A story about escaping the terrible place, and the people who didn’t escape.

Written: 129 according to the script. Does that feel like how much work I did, even though it was editing and not adding? I guess maybe?

No mermaid sightings today. Not even manatees.

Tomorrow I am on call in the afternoon, so I had to run all my weekend errands today. Food for me, food for the cats, drinks for me, lying in front of the fan.

My Minecraft character now has a good bow again, since even a terrible bow will give a fair bit of durability, and anybody who fishes (Dave. Dave is the one who fishes) will have a million bows with very low durability. Also I went to see the Ice Spikes biome (spiky!) and then delved into the depths to get diamonds to make armor and a sword now that I have enough bookstore credit to enchant them.

Watched: Sacrificial Princess and the King of Beasts 19-21: Well, that seems bad.

Written:182.

Not sure going to the office yesterday was really a good idea, I am pretty useless today. More than usual, I mean, or maybe I just feel more useless than usual but am actually always at nadir.

After being useless at work, I played way too much Minecraft. I added a bunch more flat land to my domain, set a bunch of it up as farmland to grow my cash crop (carrots), put down and shoveled up gravel until half of it had turned into flint and my carrots were ripe, took a shulker box full of carrots to trade for emeralds, and mined about fifty stacks of sand to trade for credit at the enchanting bookstore. The hill of sand I found is rapidly turning into a bump of sandstone.

Written: 155. It’s all terrible because I played too much Minecraft.

Thursday isn’t a particularly cursed day, but it is sacred to Thor, so I guess Christians get -1 on saves vs lightning on Thursday the 13th?

Went to the office, ate a salad thing, did a work, made up for having a leftover lunch yesterday by taking Coworker L’s unused pork curry home for dinner. Caught up a little on journalling, but not enough to make up for all the days I failed.

Read: Across the Dark Water (Richard Kadrey): A grim cyberpunk/zombie apocalypse quest novella.

Read: Black Night Parade vol 1 (Hikaru Nakamura): Hapless convenience store worker is kidnapped by the evil black Santa (the one who brings coal and switches, and takes bad kids away in a sack) to work at the North Pole with a gang of weirdos. I feel like I’m not getting the tropes and cultural references enough to appreciate it.

Read: My Stepmother & Stepsisters Aren’t Wicked vol 1 (Otsuji): Not quite 4-koma but very short pieces about a girl who thinks she’s in the Cinderella role but her stepfamily, though scary, are actually super-nice (if somewhat eccentric). It’s cute, but seeing the same twist every two pages is a bit much.

Read: Ambassador for Mars (Glynn Stewart): The doom from Chimera’s Star is playing out in roughly the expected way, but with a lot more complications.

Read: Grimwild preview (JD Maxwell): D&D with less archaic rules, explicitly intended to be the new Dungeon World. Mostly FitD, at least what’s in the preview. The magic system needs to be better defined.

Written: 137. Instead of leaping right into throwing out the second draft of the current scene and editing the first draft to give my script a workout, I skipped to the next scene to get some momentum or something. Mostly something.

I meant to go into the office, but I slept so terribly that it just wasn’t happening. I hope somebody enjoyed my grilled salmon and baklava. Did a small work.

Did a lot more flattening of terrain in Minecraft, which isn’t exactly productive, but is oddly soothing.

Written: 367. I thought the script was off by one, which can be the most annoying errors to find, but no, I changed one word in addition to adding 366, so it was spot on!

The site I use to find out what day it is has imploded, so for the moment, they’re all just days.

Played: The D&D character generation game. Usually I’m the one who has no ideas, but Kelsey asked the right questions or something. Opal Fossil, an earth genasi rune knight fighter seeking out the ancient wisdom of the giants who had a much closer connection to the primordial nature of the universe etc etc. She has a big fucken maul +1 and rune powers. 9th level, so there’s all kinds of 5E fiddly bits I have to fill in, but surely I can do that in the next two weeks. Then I hear we’re going into a dungeon!

Written: Finished up the script. It seems to work correctly despite being a complete bodge of diff and sed pipelines.

Yum, flavor.

Even though I have to work late on Mondays, I had a surprise 8am meeting to interview a guy for a thing. He seems like an okay guy, but who can be actually great at 8am?

Read: Mage-Queen’s Thief (Glynn Stewart): Book 12.5 or so of the missiles in space where magic SF technology is actual magic, and the queen has finally found a boy who is not meh. Pity he’s a career criminal and also everybody is dead.

Read: Bloody Waters (Jason Franks): An aspiring rock star makes a deal with the devil (not for guitar skills, she has those) and rock and roll skulduggery ensues. This version of the devil is pretty chill, but don’t think you can get one over on him, no matter how confident you are.

Read: Chimera’s Star (Glynn Stewart): Book 14? The current generation of protagonist finally makes contact with the outer edges of the major setting element that has been lurking since book 3 or so.

Written: Gave up on fiction for now, started working on a script to quantify how many words I’ve edited instead of just counting words I’ve added. Will it work? Maybe. Will it make any difference? Also maybe.

Hi Earl!

Also Writer’s Rights Day, but that sounds like it’s probably a thinly-veiled move for copyright maximalism.

Played: Librarians Errant. Another quick expedition into Bibliospace, another tussle with mad books and thesauri, the life of a junior librarian is always intense. Then an assortment of tasks that all collide with Club Fair Day, where Beasley Knees is once again performing a summoning that can be interrupted by Lily’s pet monster book, resulting in crocodiles and mad cows everywhere. (The book definitely has some beef with Beasley.) Filling a campus quad with crocodiles is more impressive than filling a vault with crocodiles, but the lack of novelty reduces it from “holy shit, crocodiles everywhere” to “ugh, crocodiles everywhere”. The one crocodile Lily gets to talk to is actually very nice, but the rest are just a big mess that have to be put down. Sadly, the Entrepreneurship major who scammed the team’s kobold friend Toctasnir out of a bunch of money by monopolizing textbooks is not eaten, because Thaïs is not a murderer.

Did some flattening of hills to make my Black Castle of Blackness stand out more and also have room for expansive carrot farms. Mining out one block at a time takes forever, though. Maybe I’m supposed to be making TNT?

Written: 116. This is the worst.

Really, shouldn’t 259 days out of the year be World Oceans Day?

I managed to do some errands (but not all) and fail to get temporary checks printed out and still get home in time to play Minecraft be on call. The customers were quiet so I finished the exterior of my castle and the art installation/8-channel lavamatic in the basement, and made a proper setting for my Nether portal. Muahahahaha.

Ayse did not Minecraft with us, because she was busy publishing fanfic on AO3! (It was about a Minecraft actual play or whatever they’re called.) I am very proud of her!

Watched: Nothing, Marith doesn’t want to fall out of the habit of Saturday Night Anime but she also doesn’t want to die.

Written: 127. Still all terrible.

Apparently I am not a good atheist, because I got no hugs.

I did get up early because Friday is now the day of regular 8am meeting to go with the regular 9am meeting and people who have the late schedule on Friday just get to suffer. (The alternative is to make it a different person every week, which would be even more annoying.) Someday I will learn to sleep, maybe.

After mining three zillion iron to make a zillion buckets, I finally got my entire lava lake picked up (four chests full of lava buckets!), but I can’t figure out how to put it down so that it’s all smooth.

Read: Service Model (Adrian Tchaikovsky): A robot valet, having lost his job for obvious yet mysterious reasons, must make his way in the world, finding out what it is like (not good) and why it is that way (also not good).

Written: 105.

Rather have National New Eyes Day.

I didn’t go into the office today because I’ve already used up my office clothes for the week, but it turns out the office wasn’t closed for Wellness Day, so maybe I should have anyway? But I didn’t.

Read: Moonstorm (Yoon Ha Lee): It’s like The Machineries of Empire for YA: proper ritual behavior modifies the laws of physics, space conflict, depraved technologies but not as much personal depravity, divided loyalties, more Korean-flavored, etc. They don’t seem to be in our universe for a variety of reasons, but I can’t tell if that’s just magical realism or an actual plot point.

Written: 211, but this draft is really not as good. Ugh.

Do Impossible Burgers and the like count? Because those are good.

Went into the office again, ate some chicken strips, did some work.

Read: The Wrong Dead Guy (Richard Kadrey): Further adventures of the hapless thief who got recruited by the Men in Black and cannot stay out of trouble. There are plenty of dead guys in these hijinks.

Read: Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End vol 2-3 (Kanehito Yamada, Tsukasa Abe): Frieren continues retracing the path of the quest to destroy the demon king, picks up another short-lived protege of one of her old party members, and reveals some of why she is utterly terrifying.

Played: Minecraft. To smooth out this lava lake, I’m going to have to scoop it all up and put it all back down, which is going to require a lot of buckets. Time to start branch mining at Y=+16, I guess!

Written: 217 of Big Bad Con adventure notes, since I had some thoughts. I should try to get it tested or something.

Check!

Because the office is closed on Thursday for Wellness Day and also there is no gaming tonight (Ken is on vacation), I went into the office today. It was not particularly more useful than not going to the office, but hopefully I get points for showing willingness. Ate a pizza, did a work, chatted with my boss because he’s here this week.

Read: I Married My Female Friend vol 2 (Shio Usui)

Read: Flying Witch vol 10 (Chihiro Ishizuka): That’s why I didn’t recognize the new characters in 11 and 12, because I hadn’t read 10 where they were introduced!

Played: Nothing, Ken is on vacation.

Written: 171.

 

Really a pretty swell invention, even though I haven’t used one in ages.

Watched: Helluva Boss 2.7½: The Sally Mae-visits-Millie special. A bit of the old ultra-violence.

Watched: Helluva Boss 2.8: Marith is right, the fic writers already watched this episode 377 times in simulation and knew how it was going to go, but that didn’t make it less painful. And Blitz was almost a functional adult for some parts of the episode! (Loona, as usual, was secretly MVP.)

Watched: The Ancient Magus’ Bride 2.17-18: All the pieces of the doom are converging!

Written: 132.

This time I slept in on purpose, which obviously makes it much better, and woke up in plenty of time to run errands and then spend 9234562349 hours playing Minecraft. I finished moving stuff indoors, then mined an Imperial buttload of netherrack and smelted it all into nether bricks to make the bottom and edge of my moat. My mining tunnel got to a deposit of basalt (meh, I can make it at home) and blackstone (vital for any proper black castle) but then a stupid piglin leapt in the way of my pick and got mad and I ended up back home. I’ll have to go back and mine more blackstone later.

My castle isn’t even complete and I’m already planning a Nether garden for my portal. Not sure how far I can move it from its current position before it generates a new portal in the Nether and messes up the rail line, though.

Written: 201.

DInosaurs, milk, olives, pineapples, black bears, hazelnut cake, nail polish, …

I accidentally turned off my alarm, so I ended up sleeping in until after noon without even meaning to. No dinosaurs for me! However, I did make it to errands and back home in time for Saturday Minecraft. Marith showed me her village and fishpond and evil shrine and ginormous cavern, which were all very nice, definitely better than my black castle of blackness. I also got a bunch of stuff moved from the temporary work camp into the black castle of blackness, and barrels with signs so possibly I can find things.

Ayse did not play Minecraft with us because she was busy finishing up and posting her Minecraft SMP fanfic to AO3. I don’t know anything about the source, but it is a good story in its own right and gives me Amber vibes.

Watched: Sacrificial Princess and the King of Beasts 17-18: Apparently that wasn’t the final boss of the season, but he was super-annoying anyway.

Written: 242

Parrots are good with language, corvids are good with tool use, they should team up and take over the world.

I did not take over the world. I did some work, I played some Minecraft, I deliquesced into sludge.

That’s probably enough blackstone to finish my castle, or at least the top floor if not the entire roof and battlements.

Read: Chainsaw Man vol 2 (Tatsuki Fujimoto): The main character is easily manipulated by getting to second base, which is plausible for a lonely and poorly-socialized teenage boy, but meh. Also, new characters and the old ultra-violence.

Read: My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom vol 9 (Satoru Yamaguchi, Nami Hidaka): Katarina graduates from school and joins the workforce, but what do you mean there’s more romance targets for Maria and more doom flags?!

Read: Mysterious Disappearances vol 1 (Nujima): A former child prodigy author who feels washed up, mysterious teenagers, cursed books, urban legends, transformations, assorted mysteries. Kind of raunchy, but the mysterious stuff is actually interesting.

Read: Blood Blade vol 2 (Oma Sei): Further adventures of Dracula-reincarnated-as-a-young-girl and the people she keeps defeating and befriending by being totally OP, this time with an equally OP adversary.

Written: 152.

One out of two isn’t bad? (I’m no Meatloaf.)

Went into the office again, but this time all of us who are normally there were there to see our boss, except the one who’s out and the one who had to WFH so really it was just me and Coworker T. Found out that Coworker R is no longer with us, which is sad but honestly not surprising. Ate a rice bowl, sat on a customer call for hours.

Read: She Loves To Cook, and She Loves To Eat vol 4 (Sakaomi Yuzaki): More cooking, more eating, more love!

Played: Zoomwarts! Every magic castle is better with a troll in the basement, right?

Written: 177. I’m really not convinced this second draft is any better than the first draft.

Everybody likes otters, pretty much.

Went into the office, met my boss in person since he’s in town, ate a brisket sandwich, did a work.

Played too much Minecraft, didn’t even get that much sand.

Read: Glitch vol 3 (Shima Shinya): The plot thickens! Which is to say, the kids have gotten some explanation which may even turn out to be true, and now they know there’s time pressure.

Read: Witch Hat Atelier vol 12 (Kamome Shirahama): That’s a particularly distressing city-wide catastrophe! Also, this is going to have awful consequences for witch-mundane relations.

Written: 281. I’m not sure I like any of these words, though.

But more importantly, it’s the day Jus gets promoted out of middle school!

Since Support can’t all take Wellness Day off, I took today in lieu so I could go see Jus wear a spiffy dress and walk across a stage and get a certificate. There was surprisingly little shrieking, but a lot of slinky dresses for 8th grade. Afterwards, we waited until restaurants were open and had sushi and ice cream of celebration.

My niece is a high-schooler now. That can’t be right!

Played: Lancer. We defeated the last iteration of the boss and triumphed, but that didn’t really help all the people who had already been killed or were now abandoned by their corporate supply chain or whatever. It’s almost like summoning unfathomable intelligences from beyond space and time to commit war crimes is not as good an idea as Second Committee though. Now we have to figure out what to play next, and it’s probably going to be Kelsey running D&D5e. Maybe I should have volunteered, but nobody wants that.

Read: Strictly No Heroics (BL Radley): A high-school lesbian in a world where some people have superpowers and are basically police with all the corruption of mundane cops and less oversight gets mixed up in an exceptionally villainous plan and there’s a hot girl and many people who need to get what’s coming to them.

Written: 271.

Thanks, everybody who fought for democracy, and if you’d like to rise up and drag someone down to hell, I have suggestions…

Didn’t sleep in quite as much today, because I had to be on call from 13-19, but still a lot. Would have worked better if I hadn’t lost my sleep mask, but oh well. Spent a lot of the day playing Minecraft.

Written: 283.

No, really! I used to have hair!

Gaming is cancelled today, so I slept in forever and then some, and finally feel like I’ve caught up from when I stayed up too late reading a week and a half ago. Then after doing a lot of nothing, I went over to Monkeycat Towers to eat tasty, tasty fajitas. Jus had half a dozen of her friends over for a Shrieking Party, and one of the friends’ moms stayed to make sure there were no axe murderers, so I kind of vaguely helped Ayse make conversation. Nobody fled screaming, the kids had a great time, the fajitas were delicious, everything was good.

Written: 208.

Where’s my Babel fish?

Despite the lack of intra-aural translation services, I walked to grocery shopping for the first time in a million years. I was not slower than before (54 minutes from my door to the sandwich shop), but I could tell I had moved my legs. I need to do this more often, although I should have started before we got into the warm part of the year.

In the afternoon, we played Minecraft together. Dave gave me bookstore credit for a load of sand, so I finally got my diamond pick enchanted, and was able to get some more diamonds to make and enchant another one. Now I can do the thing where you mine ore with Silk Touch and then bring it home to harvest with Fortune III. I also got my castle torn down and rebuilt with better materials and made more progress. Now I need to get a bunch of wood to make more storage, see if I can make a basalt machine, mine a bunch of blackstone, grow produce to trade for emeralds, explore the many caves near my castle, make a new travel bed, plant bamboo for scaffolding, etc, etc.

No anime, Marith is still not feeling up to going places or doing things.

Written: 169. Had to go back and fix several sentences because I’m reading a book written in present tense and that makes me write in present tense. I guess there’s nothing stopping me from writing a story in present tense, but this one has too much written in past tense already.

Commemorating the day Baby Phoenix blew up an entire planet of asparagus people?

Played: No Zoomwarts, Marith is flat.

Read: Flying Witch vol 12 (Chihiro Ishizuka): Akane is kind of terrifying even when she’s sober.

Read: The Splendid Work of a Monster Maid vol 2 (Yugata Tanabe): The catgirl maid and her new friends the robot maid and flesh golem maid continue hunting down scattered pieces of their patron’s magic, and also becoming better friends.

Written: 198.

 

Turtles are good.

Went to the office even more tiredly, ate a pork curry that was surprisingly spicy for something delivered to a corporate office, did some work, butted into my coworkers’ conversations.

Read: Alpi the Soul Sender vol 3 (Rona): Finally, backstory about Alpi’s parents and the other soul sender! Also, mundanes being terrible.

Read: Flying Witch vol 11 (Chihiro Ishizuka): The level of magic in this series keeps getting higher and higher, and yet the characters are not any more serious.

Written: 189.

Also Canadian Immigrants Day, so one for Ken and one for me.

Went to the office, ate a barbecue pork sandwich, did a small amount of work.

Read: A Cat From Our World and the Forgotten Witch vol 2 (Hiro Kashiwaba): More people in the fantasy world are converted to cat lovers, as is only right and proper. It’s a pretty grim world, though, as bad as ours.

Read: The Everything Box (Richard Kadrey): A somewhat hapless thief in the magical crime underworld gets tapped to steal a box that everybody else also wants and hijinks ensue. Lots of hijinks, some murders, inept cultists, inept angels, secret government agencies, betrayal exes who inexplicably did not develop better taste in their time apart, etc.

Read: Otherside Picnic vol 9 (Iori Miyazawa, Eita Mizuno, Shirakaba): They are getting awfully blase about going to a dimension of death and fear. Surely that is going to continue to work out well for them. Also Sorawo might be coming to realizations.

Read: “We Travel the Spaceways” (Victor LaValle): Black magic realism, I guess? I liked it, but it was weird.

Read: Please Don’t Tell My Parents I’m A Giant Monster (Richard Roberts): Reread, because who doesn’t like a book about a disabled catgirl getting extra superpowers? I am still kind of waiting for the book from Claire’s PoV, though.

Written: 134.

Pretty sure they would all give up their calendar day in exchange for No Exceptions to Minimum Wage Day, though.

Played: Nothing, Kelsey is dead from work and it’s Ken’s anniversary or something. Next week for sure?

Read: The Ancient Magus’ Bride vol 18-19 (Kore Yamazaki): The last volume I have, which fortunately is also the end of the arc! Some people got what was coming to them, some people got less than they deserved. I wonder what the next arc will be? Chise and Elias don’t seem to have been thrown out of the College, but maybe that’s just because the administrative hearing won’t be convened until after winter holidays.

Read: Hitomi-chan is Shy With Strangers vol 8 (Chorisuke Natsumi): Apparently I only liked this one for the gimmick, because now that nobody is terrified of the FMC and it’s just characters, meh. I think it has to come off the list.

Read: Chainsaw Man vol 1 (Tatsuki Fujimoto): Apparently super-popular, so I picked up the first volume to see why. A young boy, trapped into hunting monsters by the yakuza holding his late parents’ debt (apparently this is how Japanese law actually works?!), is betrayed and murdered and comes back to life by merging with his monstrous chainsaw-puppy. Recruited by the civic monster-hunting squad, cute female leader treats him like a dog (ah, that must be the fan appeal), lots of transformation violence, etc. Presumably there will be many power-ups in later volumes. Obviously it would be better if all major characters were female.

Read: The Pale House Devil (Richard Kadrey): Supernatural hitmen with hearts of gold (14K or so) get roped into working for a horrible old man who called up that which he could not put down, take a shine to his daughter, betrayal and murder ensue continue. I would read more about these characters.

Written: 133.

Two great observances that go great together!

Watched: The Ancient Magus’ Bride 2.15-17: That actually seems pretty tame for a bunch of teenagers locked up for weeks on end.

Read: The Ancient Magus’ Bride vol 17 (Kore Yamazaki): Now I’m ahead of where we are in the anime, and yikes!

Written: 268. Am I drawing this scene out too much? Am I summarizing the wrong parts? Am I just an extremely bad writer?